15 Years at Liferay: Chapter 2 - Calls on the Roof and Dogs on the Floor

Everything about how I got the job at Liferay was unorthodox. And that strangeness continued into the first day on the job.

Day 1

Saechang and I agreed to arrive at early to the job at 8am. We were told that the start time would be at 9am. We talked nervously about what we were doing and about our beat up cars that were falling apart. Mike’s trusty Scion xA with 300,000+ miles and my beat up Toyota Tercel. We waited. We prayed. 9am rolled around and we waited for someone to open the gate to the church courtyard and welcome us into our new job. Tens of minutes passed and we became nervous. Did we have the right start date? Was this a joke? Finally, at 10am, someone arrived and let us in – apologizing along the way.

The Office

In 2008, Liferay’s “HQ” was based out of a church in Diamond Bar, CA. The church had a large open courtyard, sunday school classrooms, a sanctuary, a handball court, a big dirt field, and a loft filled with desks and desktop PCs. Amenities included water, chips, and a modest kitchen with a fridge and microwave. I think there was a point when we had a toaster oven, but I believe that got axed because Brian felt they were too messy and unsanitary for numerous people to use. I was bummed about that.

Speaking of people, at the time of hiring, I think that Saechang and I were somewhere between the fiftieth to sixtieth employees hired to work at Liferay. By comparison, the company now has ~1000 employees globally. Back then, at the Diamond Bar office, there may have been ~20+ folks who worked there on a regular basis.

Our onboarding, was sitting down at some Dell desktops loaded w/ Windows XP and Brian telling us our quota for replying to threads on the message boards, being told to mess around with Liferay Portal, and to not screw around and play video games or he would fire us on the spot.

And so we threw ourselves into fumbling around and trying to figure out what it was that we were to do – we had no idea what Liferay was, no concept of what a web portal was in both an abstract business rationale sense or in practical usage, let alone any idea how that related to an application server, a database, Java, the whole nine. It was all absolutely and terrifyingly novel. We had been parachuted into a strange land we did not know, to do a mission we only loosely understood, to speak a language for which we did not even know the alphabet for.

Fun and Friendship

In those early days we would sometimes spend an entire day trying to troubleshoot and understand one single concept – concepts that now sound laughably easy, were brutal slogs then. “Run Liferay using MySQL and not HSQL”. 😅

One thing that made those early days fun, bearable, and precious was the distinct culture that the office had at the time. Speaking of the office, I should say that besides it being located at a church, it did not resemble a ‘typical’ office in any way. There were no cubicles and all desks were arranged openly around the room. Brian and Nate would periodically break out into debates on politics, philosophy, and theology. We would take breaks to have impromptu handball tournaments, I recall Jerry Niu and Jon Neal being the people to beat. And these were serious handball games, we would be awful sweaty messes at the end of those games.

Lots of folks then would brown bag their lunches and we would eat lunches together in the courtyard. Meanwhile, Brian’s dogs would sometimes roam the church grounds. They were horrible drooling messes, running up to everyone who came into the gate and drooling on them. Also they would sometimes come up stairs into the loft and put their heads on your lap – awful if you wanted to keep your clothes clean. They were eventually latter barred from the grounds, which was probably for the best.

The First Retreat

The first Liferay retreat that I went to, was maybe only mere weeks into the job. The retreat was at a Salvation Army retreat site in Malibu, CA. I remember this retreat well, for several reasons:

• I got to meet the other folks who worked at Liferay who were super kind and genuine
• I didn’t have sheets, heating, or a blanket on the bed in my room – thank goodness someone had a sleeping bag on hand
• I distinctly recall having meetings and almost falling asleep in them because I did not understand the topics being discussed
• Also many people got food poisoning (those who did get this probably want to forget this part)

Next Steps

As time went on, Mike and I continued to do the best we could – taking lots of notes and trying to make slow incremental progress solving problems day by day. We apparently did that well enough because eventually Brian began to make more specific demands of us: “Here’s this thing called Selenium, figure it out and use it to make sure Liferay works. Show me something by the end of the week.” “Which of you is going to China?” “I need to send one of you to Ohio and you’re going to learn Java.”

Now of those three things, all of them were terrifying, and only two of them came to pass. Brian eventually asked Mike and I to start testing Liferay Portal and so we did. And that was how Quality Assurance (at least as an organized, intentional discipline) began at Liferay; two former delivery guys flying by the seat of our pants, trying to make the most of the opportunity that was afforded us. Saechang eventually did go to China, but that’s probably his story to tell. Brian ultimately did not send either of us to Ohio to work on a client project with other consultants (or to become consultants ourselves) – whether that’s because the project did not need us or he understood our limits better than we could communicate them to him, it’s unclear to me.

And so, the unlikely odd job segued to something new: an unlikely career starting QA at Liferay.

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