clicksave

Did you know you can help the environment every day with the click of a mouse or by using an app?

Every time you look up phone numbers and business info via online directories or social media, you can help cut down on over 200 million pounds of hazardous wastes, including highly toxic sulfur (a cause of acid rain) and methanol gas, generated by the the U.S. pulp and paper industry.

Click to find the info you’re looking for and save trees, which hold onto 50% of the world’s carbon, that would otherwise be released and contribute to global warming. An estimated 5 million trees are cut down each year to produce white pages directories, and over 165,000 tons of waste that end up in landfills. Download the WhitePages app and help the environment while you find the info you need.

*Sources: Reach for Unbleached Foundation: http://www.rfu.org/cacw/pollution.html, Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.): http://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/june2011/papermill.htm, The Daily Green: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/7447

Posted by Rebecca Carroll on October 11, 2013 In News
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Grace Hopper 2013 – A Guy’s Perspective

Owyn Richen —  October 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

kristineI recently went with several co-workers to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. My teammate, Kristine Delossantos, was giving a lightning talk about the technology behind Current Caller ID, and I wanted to go support the team and help with recruiting. I was a little intimidated thinking about being among the minority at the conference, gender-wise, and it made me better understand how a woman might feel in our male-dominated industry. Once I got there, all I really felt was excitement about having the opportunity to learn from leaders in both the academic and industry sectors, who happen to be women.

Women only make up 23% of computer science professionals, according to Telle Whitney, head of the Anita Borg institute. We have a growing gap between the number of computing jobs that are available in the US, and workers skilled enough to fill them. Code.org projects that there will be 1.4 million computing jobs by 2020, but only 400,000 computer science students, and increasing those numbers is essential for the technology industry in the US to continue to be leaders in global innovation. Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd college and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook discussed at the keynote how essential it was to encourage women to go into the field earlier in the education cycle to help bridge the gap, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

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I met quite a few interesting people, and had a ton of great discussions with women in all areas of computing, from students to senior leaders. I got a chance to hear some really interesting research that people were doing. One woman, Emma from Harvard, sat next to me and we talked about her PhD research, which was in the field of computer vision. Apparently the brain can process data from the eyes with only a few watts of energy, and current computer vision techniques that rely on large computing-based neural networks are not nearly that efficient. She was exploring how to increase the energy efficiency using specialized hardware sensors that have the various convolution filters built in. She mentioned one reason for the research was to improve the vision capabilities of the Robobee project at Harvard, which itself sounds pretty cool.

The mixture of academics and industry leaders created a great blend of pure innovation and innovation applied towards business goals in a single location. In the same lightning talk panel in which Kristine was presenting, another woman, Denise Koessler from the University of Tennessee, was presenting an abridged version of her PhD thesis. It was describing how each phone customer has a unique call and text pattern based on times and durations of call/lengths of text, which Denise theorized could be used social fingerprint. Current, our product, actually presents some of the same types of information to our customers for information purposes and it was insightful to hear about how mobile carriers could leverage the data for customer identification and acquisition at scale.

owyngirlsAll in all, the experience was really enlightening and wonderful. I learned some things about myself and how gender is still an issue in our industry. I learned that even though I think I’m not gender-biased, I need to work hard to be better and recognize that there are still unconscious biases that both women and men have that can be actively corrected. I got to hang out with many of my female co-workers and get to know them better. I got to learn about really interesting technical research, and hear about women’s experiences in our industry. I was further convinced how essential it is for us all to get our children, both daughters and sons, to learn about computer science earlier in school to ensure they are set up for success in the work force of tomorrow. I would strongly encourage both men and women to attend GHC next year.

Click here to view Kristine’s presentation

In News
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Community, Education and Excellence

Katie McCorkell —  September 23, 2013 — Leave a comment

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer it’s this, “start before you’re ready”. Which makes it ironic then, that I’m writing this after my internship has technically ended. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what to write about and I was also really busy shipping to production. I could have quickly written at length about the endless office snacks, the Razor scooters or the incredibly comfortable egg chairs here at the office. But from what I’ve heard, these are pretty standard fair for elite Seattle tech companies, and they’re the type of thing that doesn’t really matter in the long run. What matters to me is community, education and excellence, three values I found everywhere at WhitePages.katie chair

This summer was my first computer science internship, having only discovered the field late in my college career, as is not uncommon for women. Like Nick wrote in his intern blog, WhitePages gave me an interview when many other companies said only, “see you next year”. Even before accepting my offer, I was connected with my team and a mentor, Owyn Richen. After accepting I was in weekly correspondence with Owyn. That winter I had decided to tackle Rails for a personal project, and he helped me work out model-data organization and possible offline storage solutions. I was taking a Databases class, and he explained how the SQL v. NoSQL v. NewSql question is answered at WhitePages, which was incredibly cool to see how my coursework applied in the real world. During my internship, Owyn checked in with me almost every day, “How’s it going, what can I help you with, when are you shipping?” Even though he used Emacs, he created a fast-paced and safe learning environment.

Owyn wasn’t the only one at the company eager to help me learn and ship. When I submitted my pull request at least five people reviewed every single line of my code, which, although incredibly nerve wracking, helped me learn more about Ruby in day then I might have otherwise in a year. It also proved that WhitePages was serious about excellent code.

The commenters were all people I had met before or would soon meet at one of our twice-monthly company happy hours. The happy hours were a great place to learn more about the tech industry in Seattle, make friends with my coworkers, ramble with Devin Ben-Hur about databases and pester the design people to do a caricature of me. Katie character

In addition to the happy hours, I had another opportunity for growth at the Intern Coffee Chats. At these meetings, the interns were given an hour to talk with the leaders at WhitePages. We met with the CEO, CFO, CTO, CRO and team leaders to talk about everything from career paths to SnapChat’s business model. WhitePages takes advantage of its small size to educate all engineers about the business. At least twice this summer the Mobile team business leader gave a presentation about the plans for our products and impact on company business as a whole. All engineers were in attendance and asking tough questions that made me realize they really cared. As a new programmer, it set a great precedent for me: I was given a very challenging back-end project, but I was also responsible for understanding why the project was important and what impact it would have. Furthermore, I was expected to give an hour-long presentation about it!

A year ago, the longest time I’d talked about a computer science project was five minutes, and the longest I’d worked on a project, was five hours. Now, thanks to the encouragement and opportunity at WhitePages, I’ve spent three months writing and shipping a high quality service in a new language. I learned how to use Chef for dev-driven deployment and how Lucene indexes work. Most importantly I’ve connected with mentors who will influence me my whole career. Next month, WhitePages is sponsoring me, a former intern, to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. When I’m there I’m excited to share what I’ve learned, “Start before you’re ready. And consider starting at WhitePages.”

In Developer's Corner, Just For Fun, News
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grandparents

Do you have memories of Grandma making “the best” pancakes on Sunday morning, or your grandpa helping you learn to ride a bike or being the first one to ask: “Who wants ice cream?”

And if you’ve got kids, they might be making some of the same memories with your parents.

Grandparents Day is today, September 8th. So why not give them a call and tell them why they’re special. Don’t have their number handy? Use our app to find their number – and make their day!

Posted by Rebecca Carroll on September 8, 2013 In Just For Fun
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Internship Guide for CSE Majors

Shen Wang —  September 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

My name is Shen Wang. I am a Computer Science major senior studying at University of Washington Seattle campus. Currently, I am working as an intern here at WhitePages. Every CSE major knows the importance of that first perfect internship and asks just about every person they can find all kinds of questions. Thus, I’d love to share my experience, and hopefully it can help others find the perfect fit.

Where it all started

The first time I came across WhitePages was at the fall CSE career fair. Being the only company that offered coding challenges, WhitePages quickly grabbed my attention. I took a copy of the challenge and sat on the stairs and started working on it. Due to the pressure I gave myself to come up with something clever, I was not able to perform as well as I could and did not get very far.

Time flew by quickly afterwards and the Winter/Spring career fair was right around the corner. After my first unsuccessful adventure at the previous career fair and missing my mom and puppy in China, whom I haven’t seen them in nearly three years, I was seriously considering spending the summer back in China. At the fair, WhitePages was again the only company that offered a coding challenge. Wanting to redeem myself, I took the challenge again. My mindset this time was a lot different. Instead of trying to impress, I just wanted to improve upon the last time and show exactly what I could do. This mindset clearly worked out for me. Instead of getting only a couple opportunities that lasted only through the initial screening, I was able to grab the interest of a number of companies and go much deeper in the interview process. Among the companies was WhitePages.

After the career fair were two whole busy weeks full of due dates and interviews. Honestly, I was a bit surprised when I received the email from WhitePages asking if I’d be interested in a second round test. After replying with “YES, PLEASE. THANK YOU!”(In a longer version of course), I was given a shot at the second coding question. Luckily, I was able to ace this second challenge and given an opportunity for an on-site interview. The on-site interview was a lot more fun. The interviewers were the managers from various teams. Typically, intern candidates only get to meet with two managers. In my case, however, another manager (whom I work under now) was especially interested in me and asked if I would be able to stay a bit longer. Long story short, the interview took 4 hours that day and was a lot of fun. I learned a lot from the interviewers and was fully entertained (and fed) the whole time. Shortly after, I had a very competitive offer in my hands. The offer was generous and I was given a soft deadline of two weeks to decide. After spending a week closing out other interviews and a half-bragging-half-sorry Skype session with my mom, I accepted the offer.

There were a number of welcome/orientation events, happy hours and free Friday lunches during the time after the offer and before summer.

Life at WhitePages

While I could just finish this section with one word “AWESOME”, I should probably go into more depth so this guide does not make it to the “Worst Guides of All Time” list.

Working at WhitePages is a great experience. All the time and effort spent by HR, interviewers and candidates really pays off. Every single person here working here truly fits here. I can always rely on the people around me to be friendly, helpful and smart. Remember how annoying and poisonous that lazy person from you group project course was? There is absolutely no need to worry about that working here.

One of the topics that is covered all the time in intern talks is Big Company VS. Small Company. The conclusion always becomes big ones are more financially stable and smaller ones allow people to make a bigger impact. One of the groups that is not covered in this topic is a medium company like WhitePages. Medium sized companies can often provide the best of both worlds. Finance is never an issue, and small and independent teams allow ideas to be exchanged, discussed and evaluated very quickly. For example, my project this summer is actually geared towards making a brand new product, and I get to do interesting research work and learn about how to launch a new service into production from the ground up.

Another shining spot about interning at WhitePages is the amount of mentorship I’ve received. During my two months here, I have learned a ton of things in different areas: from coding style to approaches to problems, astronomy to physics, statistics to the hottest and newest video game, career growth to interview tips, from beer to whiskey, and conversations covering all ranges of topics.

Last but not least, we also have a HR department that is dedicated to making everyone happy. We have alternating free Friday lunches and happy hours, and a kitchen always fully stocked with free treats (yogurt being my favorite).

Oh, and did I mention for August we only worked 4 days a week and had 3-day weekends all month?

Final Advice

1. Instead of working hard to impress the interviewer right before an interview, work hard on a daily basis, and just believe what you have on the table is enough to impress.
2. There are many opportunities in the CS industry. A bad interview or unfit position is not the end of world but rather an arrow sign pointing next door.
3. Medium Size Company = Big | Small > Big || Small
4. Apply at WhitePages

In Life at WhitePages
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