I'm learning a lot at work. Information retrieval is a much more interesting field than I thought. There's lots of interesting algorithms in web search, most of them have been done by Google or others. But there's still a lot of space in the markets for more search engines. The PageRank algorithm is a bit easier to implement than I thought. It's not that easy to do on a large scale of course, but conceptually it's not that difficult to understand. The research today is in the fields of image and video retrieval.

I've had to read a bunch of papers on how to search the web and crawl large amounts of data. I am pretty familiar with the tools and the architecture for large systems, but now I know a lot more about the algorithms which you'd use to build a search engine. The environment at work is a lot more academic than I'm used to. We have a lot of PhD's considering our size. My background is a little different because it's much more software engineering oriented. Software engineering actually has very little to do with algorithms and a lot to do with software process. I've almost never had to implement a sort or a hash table. I'm more used to dealing with systems management and process improvement. This job is a nice change because I feel like I'm learning really interesting and different types things.

I'm doing a bit more database work than I'm used to. It's a bit ironic, because for a very long time I've tried to avoid being the database guy. But now I'm doing more of it at work than I've ever done before. I'm doing more mysql than I have ever needed to know, but that's actually a been more fun than I thought it'd be.

Tracy is happy that she brought a new client to her firm, so she gets a bonus for that. If you're in need of legal services, she'd be happy to hook you up.