About six weeks ago, I started a new job at Renesys. I've been working on a really cool product, but I've been so busy working on it that I've hardly had time to tell people what it's all about.

First, my executive summary: Renesys Market Intelligence is a web-based application that helps sales, marketing, and peering staff at internet service carriers do better business. Renesys gathers a vast amount of intelligence about the network structure on the global internet using real-time BGP analysis. We process this data (the Internet Index) and determine who's connected to whom, why, and since when. We follow customer and provider relationships, peering, and help growing providers find potential new customers. We also generate real-time, localizable rankings that show top ISPs for customer loyalty in Lithuania, and other objective rankings worldwide or within any country, US state, or US metro area.

Still interested? The product launches today so I can finally point you at:

• the Renesys website
• SCREENSHOTS!
• launch press release
• an analyst review in Telephony Online

If you have more questions, let me know. Especially if you work at a big telecom firm.

My software engineering professor once told me that it usually takes 6 months for a software engineer to learn the ropes at a new job and reach normal productivity. I'm at about 4.5 months today, and can anecdotally confirm that figure.

When I started here I had just come from school, where I almost never had to work with anyone else. I never had to work to understand code written by years of programmers before me. I was never given a task without some tools to help me get it done or at least some sympathy from other students.

Work has turned out to be more like research than I expected. The answers, the fixes, are not known by the person who gives you orders. You start on something and you become the expert; perhaps you write some documentation, purely from the kindness of your heart. In schooling success is largely engendered by compromising at the right times, persistence, and asking for help. In work, some help is available but there is, in some sense, more personal responsibility. On the other hand, the stakes may seem smaller than at school because evaluation is less frequent and more subjective. Which is not to say that the evaluation is any less important, but it's hard to imagine going home and crying like a Harvard student with a B if you get a $1000 raise instead of a $3000 raise.