I've dealt a lot with Nikita, and he's an awesome guy - patient, always willing to help out, just all around great. And they've got a new game coming out (Hero Trap), looks great!
There's nothing like the increasing panic of the other team as you get closer and closer. We've often ended with a military victory just before a snail victory - the enemy queen comes in for a last attempt and is nailed by a warrior.
We've got a cabinet at Pure Storage in Mountain View. In fact, the "private collector" is one of our managers - and he's a video game nut all right. The game is tremendous fun, and very well balanced. We used to think economic victory wasn't worth it because you'd finish snail first, then a team focused and swept. And playing 5 on 5 is just crazy.
This summer our interns were laying waste to everyone else. I thought I was good, but they were better. Good thing they went back to college!
So if anyone wants to come by, see the office, and sneak in a game - I'm sure you'll find interested people.
It's very easy to cause a ton of problems with commodity routers. The University of Wisconsin - Madison CS department got DOSed back in 2003 by Netgear routers using the CS NTP server because it was hard-coded into the router firmware. Full story is linked below:
Software engineers, core development and testing positions, Mountain View, CA and Bellevue, WA.
Pure Storage is a fast growing, pre-IPO company in the heart of the Silicon Valley, whose world-class engineers are disrupting a $60 billion (and growing) market for enterprise storage. Our founders created the company with a passion to build storage technology customers love and deliver it with simplicity and service that fundamentally changes the enterprise storage experience. With over $470 million in funding from some of the most prominent venture capitalists, our record revenue growth and impressive margins have landed us a valuation of over $3 billion.
Our products are faster than legacy storage, much simpler to manage and much more environmentally friendly, consuming only 10% of the power and rack space of the traditional refrigerator-size, disk-based atrocities.
With a virtually unlimited budget for great talent, we’re looking for passionate top-notch engineers to join the rocket ship that is Pure Storage and help us continue to build the next great, lasting, enterprise company.
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Now my personal comments :)
Emphasis on C or C++ is a good thing; the core software is written in C++ and we do a lot of linux kernel work. This is the most sophisticated product I've ever worked on; we have a combination of cutting edge software design, truly awesome features to get the most out of our flash, and a dedication to data integrity that cannot be matched.
Mountain View, CA - Pure Storage (www.purestorage.com). Visas possible, relocation required (no work from home).
120 engineers, ~450-500 employees overall.
We're building flash-based storage arrays and are growing incredibly rapidly in the market. Technically still a startup, but at a more mature point; no 120-hour work weeks required. Best team I've ever worked with, fantastic velocity in the market. We're the best array out there and it shows; we consistently beat other startups and established companies.
Despite producing hardware, we're heavily a software shop, mostly C++; GUI is javascript, scripting support is Python.
You can do pretty radical modifications of code too if you're willing to move it somewhere else to get the room to enlarge things. It turns out that almost all x86 instructions are position independent; there's only a few that are. Then you jump from the original location to the patch, run the patch, and jump back.
Gratuitous plug - that was my doctoral research (among other things, hot-patching in safety checks on a running Apache binary), and I wouldn't mind seeing it get used for a good purpose. The code's available at www.dyninst.org.
It seems like it depends on the field. I joined my current startup at 36, and there's a lot of people older than me - also, some younger. Some with kids, some without. But that's in the storage industry, not web apps, so there might be some institutional bias or lack thereof.