I’ve not blogged about anything since past 6-7 months or so (no energy to check out the actual date). I’m writing this post inspite of my tiredness, because I’m really excited & I just can’t stop myself from writing it. Please pardon me for my bad english & all grammatical mistakes! Also, like my previous blog posts, this blog post will also be full loads of redundant smilies! So here it goes:

This is what I’ve done in past 5-6 months

•  Searching for a paid job
  • I started my job search & preparation in february-march.
  • I applied to quite a few companies, but didn’t get any calls from any companies except one company, which is booking.com.
• Interviews season
  • They (Booking.com) are one of the prominent Perl shops in Europe. Their IT department is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
  • They interviewed me on phone on April Fools’ day 😀
  • After some days, they invited me to Amsterdam, Netherlands for two in-person interviews on 2nd June.
  • All these interviews were technical. I was informed that I’ll have one HR interview as well, but I won’t call it an interview, it was more of a casual chat with their HR! 🙂
• Post interview
  • I got to know that I’ve got selected on the in-person interview day itself i.e. on 2nd June.
  • Since then I’ve been preparing for relocating to Amsterdam :D.
  • But this preparation have come to an end now, because location of this post 🙂
• Relocating to Amsterdam:
  • One of the best things about booking.com is that they’ve made relocation to Amsterdam very easy.
    • Booking.com paid for all my travels & my luggage (which is 4 big travel bags).
    • If you’ve pets and a partner, then booking.com will help in relocating them as well. But in my case, I’ve moved alone.
    • They help in moving big things as well in 15ft containers. But I had 4 travel bags only.
    • They provide a temporary accomodation for a period of 2 weeks until you find a house for yourself. This temporary accomodation period could be extended to 4 weeks maximum.
  •  Bad experience
    • If you’re moving to Netherlands or some other country for job or studies, then you need to get your documents apostilled.
    • I had to run a lot to government offices for getting my documents apostilled.
    • It takes a lot of time & effort to get these things done. Even indefinite time & I mean it! 😦
    • I’ll write another post about it in detail.
    • Lifting 4 travel bags for a while, because I’m not that strong 😀
• Apart from job hunting, moving etc., I’ve learnt or still learning:
  • Flask, a web framework written in Python
  • SQLAlchemy, an ORM written in Python
  • LaTeX, a type-setting system, which is very useful for making documents, presentations etc.

The FUTURE

• Excitement…so many reasons…
  • Booking.com is one of the best Perl shops in the world.
  • They contribute a lot to the Open source world.
  • World’s best Perl (but not only Perl) programmers are working there, who contribute a lot to open source. I’m not going to give you the list, it’s too long & I’m tired.
  • Living on my own in a beautiful city like Amsterdam.
  • Lifting 4 travel bags for a while, because I’m not that strong physically 😀
• Oh! What I’ll be doing at booking.com!
  • I’ll be a Software Developer trainee for an year.
  • First month is critical
    • Yep, it is!
    • First month will be the probationary period & they people could send me back to my country if I won’t do well.
    • So, this will push me to give my best! Hope so! 🙂
  • On 6th August, my future team lead sent me a welcome email 🙂
  • I’ll be working on image and text processing.
  • I’ll need to learn:
    • HTML::Mason templating system
    • Class::DBI ORM
    • Scrum process for software development
    • JQuery.
• Nervousness…
  • MEETING SO MANY FAMOUS & ROCKING PEOPLE AT BOOKING.COM 😀