mokudekiru

Hello world, I’m at Facebook

I’m currently just past the halfway mark of my Software Engineering Internship at Facebook. People often ask me what it’s like working at Facebook, so I may as well start writing it down. For background, I’m on the Profile team and I’ve been here since the beginning of June.

So here we go, Chapter 1: WTF is so good about industry (other than $$)?

I didn’t really get the appeal of industry before this summer. Until now, I have been somewhat solidly in the academia camp. I did REUs at Carnegie Mellon and UC Santa Cruz the past two summers, both of which I enjoyed greatly. Work was fun, interesting, and laid-back.

However, back at school (UIUC), most top Computer Science students seem to have little interest in academia, which always sort of mystified me. I saw mostly similarities between industry and academia – like that you get to work on hard problems that you [hopefully] find interesting. Industry involves bigger bags of money certainly, but there’s no way that explains what I perceive as an almost complete disinterest in academia – most kids I know in CS are definitely not in it for the money anyway…maybe they just hate school?

So I considered my summer at Facebook partially an experiment to determine what people actually like so much about industry. Results: semi-conclusive.

I’m in Your News Feed

One afternoon around 3 PM of my 3rd week at Facebook, I was in the middle of some work and refreshed my news feed. The first or second story in my feed was from one of my friends in Sweden who had just updated part of his profile. I glanced over the story, and then basically did a doubletake. WAIT a MINUTE, that story seemed a little TOO familiar. I realized it used code I had written over a couple of days the previous week. And it was now on real, live Facebook…

NO WAY!!!

It had never occurred to me to be concerned with how long it would take from starting work and getting code on Real Live Facebook… Turns out, it was about a week – half a week if you discount the few days of orientation at the beginning where I wasn’t writing code.

A week!? I had never even written or read a line of php before coming to Facebook.

“Move fast and break things” is the Facebook engineers’ catchphrase, but it’s also thanks to the release engineers / release infrastructure that we, as engineers, can actually do so. I am impressed.

Building Stuff People Use

Merely getting code shipped fast is not something I can see myself getting super-excited about though. The essence of the awesomeness I felt here was that I made something and a few days later SOMEONE I KNOW is using it, and bonus, I actually get to SEE them use it. This was so exciting and motivating, and I think it’s the key to industry for me – there was no moment in either of my previous two internships that had the same oomph, simply because there was no way to immediately and definitively see that what I was working on was USEFUL because it was being USED, then and there. Perhaps my work had the same or greater long-term impact, but there was no way for me to tell in a concrete, non-theoretical way. Hmm.

So this realization does sort of limit my employment interests to a couple of rows of icons of iPhone apps — I no longer am interested in working for a company unless I use their product a lot. But given that, and the fact that my level of Facebook addiction over the past 6 months may have, at some point, reached clinical insanity, I’d say coming here for the summer was probably a good call.

SEA BATTLE happened a couple of weeks ago.

The concept:
– Put 2000 exchange students from around Scandinavia on a boat
– Get them really really drunk, whilst boat sails by night from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia
– Dump 2000 hungover exchange students in Tallinn for 8 hours
– Bring them back on the boat before they regain consciousness and get into too much former-soviet trouble
– Get them really drunk, again, as boat sails by night back to Stockholm

There are a couple of different party cruises available to Lund exchange students — I chose Sea Battle because it seemed like the biggest one, and also because I figured I wouldn’t ever make it to Tallinn otherwise.

I’m On a Boat

Here was our boat:

Here is where I slept, on the boat, with 3 other Lund exchange students:

The boat has something like 4 bars and 2 clubs and stuff is just open all night. The decor was so over-the-top trying to look “clubby” that it just felt ridiculous. Club before the storm of dancing exchange students:

This is an accurate representation of what was going on on the boat, from about 1 hour after boarding, until 6 AM.

Seriously, we had free food & drinks at 8 PM, and it was sort of unbelievable how drunken and loud people were before dinner even STARTED. It would have been super obnoxious if I didn’t have a close friend with whom I could roll my eyes. It was sort of like being in the nautical version of the party scene in every high school/college movie ever.

So fun times, but there was one GIANT problem with the boat: no cell phone reception, plus 2000 people, plus enormous boat, means once you lose your friends, they’re GONE. You just have to hope you run into them again. I lost my friend Alex and didn’t find him from midnight the first night until like 9 PM the second night. Really, I don’t understand how people functioned in society before cell phones… you could just, LOSE PEOPLE! If you forgot to make a meeting time/place for next time, you might just NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN! Oh man, I am so dependent on technology.

Tallinn
Woke up, looked outside, saw ICE:

I left the boat alone, because after partying with 2000 people really the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with the same people. Plus, I love exploring new cities solo and doing whatever I want. I had a bunch of tips from my friend Tack who is a Tallinn local now. Other than meeting up with him for lunch (which was delicious — other people on the boat were complaining about the food in Estonia… clearly they were going to the wrong places), I did a bunch of things by Tack’s suggestion. Here they are in picture form, and written down for posterity:

1. Sadama Market – it’s full of stuff! And exposed me to my first Estonian conversations, where I smiled and nodded a lot. Lots of Russian dolls everywhere at Sadama. So in general, that whole “you’re not in Kansas/Sweden anymore” feeling.

2. Climb to the top of Oleviste Kirik – this was my touristy thing of the day. Oleviste Kirik is the church that’s the tallest visible thing when you look at Tallinn from far away (such as in this picture):

Climbing it was awesome. However, you do get kind of dizzy walking up a staircase like this for 20 minutes:

But totally worth it because you are rewarded with this view:

Tallinn is so adorable! (Well, at least Old Town, the part I got to see).

3. Raekoja Plats – peoplewatching and listening to the different languages tourists are speaking.

4. Vabaduse väljak (freedom square) for more peoplewatching and meeting up with Tack for lunch. Nearby, I found a good wall where I could get my Jordan Catalano on.

5. Wandering a bunch of little streets, hunting for cafes in which to use wifi.

6. Climbing Toompea hill and finding more good views.

And that was all I really had time for in Tallinn! But it was lovely, not very cold, and amazingly pleasant to walk around solo for a day. I also bought a pirate hat. Can’t do better than that.

Back on the Boat

Night 2 on the boat was was more chill than night 1. People hung out in their cabins instead of dancing wildly at the clubs.

The only bad part of the trip, however, was the bus ride back from Stockholm to Lund. It’s a 7 hour bus ride, and if that isn’t painful enough, there were 4 guys right in front of me who drank the ENTIRE ride back. They went through three bottles of vodka and probably 20 beers… witnessing 7 hours of unshowered guys drinking alcohol and singing/shouting the entire time too. One of the most disgusting experiences of my life!

As always, more pictures of Tallin on Flickr!

Never have I been so happy (or surprised!) for spring.

Sweden in the spring is magical. (Allegedly, summer is even better, but I won’t be able to report on that.)

In the last two to three weeks, the sun has come out, the trees have blossomed, the weather has warmed up to a balmy 20 degrees…and most importantly, everyone has gone into permanent spring picnic mode.

Every piece of grass or bench or seat outside in Stortorget is covered with PEOPLE. If it’s the weekend, they’re sitting in the park, drinking (see: Valborg, this Saturday), otherwise they’re just sitting outside. On big rocks, overlooking Stockholm, until 9 PM when it finally starts to think about getting dark.

It has become our full-time job to enjoy the weather.

Actually, I totally forgot spring was coming.

It’s not that the winter in Skåne was even that bad. Since January, it was consistently 0 degrees and grey — not that cold, by my standards. I never even used my heaviest jacket once. But when I arrived, everything was covered in grey ice, the sky was grey, the sun set at 4 PM, and it never even got totally light out.

I got so used to the consistently dreary weather (2.5 months straight of exactly the same weather?) that spring seemed like something that only happens in other countries, like SUVs, carpeting, and hip-hop.

But then it happened, almost overnight. All term, I’ve had Swedish class from 5-7:30 PM — it used to be dark long before I even walked to class. Suddenly, now it’s light for hours after I come home.

The whole country is in SUCH A GOOD MOOD.

And oh man, the grilling. It’s been going on for WEEKS. Grilling is big here. Like, constant 4th of July-mode level big.

(Actually, I think we jumped the gun on the grilling a little bit — it was an odd experience to stand around in the light at 8 PM, grilling a pineapple, in my winter coat.)

(Yes, you can grill pineapples.)

It’s no accident that Easter break is happening now, followed a week later by Valborg. After 9 months of winter, we have earned the right to enjoy the weather.

As my friend Polly says, “I now understand why ancient cultures worshipped the sun.”

The sun is here and it’s time to celebrate.

I think spring celebration is something I was missing out on in the US. I mean, we occasionally would sit on the quad, and I remember quite a few pleasant warm evenings eating pizza on apartment balconies, feet up. But Japan has hanami, Sweden has Valborg… I am missing the American equivalent here.

Then again, maybe it’s because Illinois has exactly 1.5 days of good weather before we go into hot&humid or tornado mode, or maybe it’s because spending more than an hour outside means my allergies will cause my immune system to self-destruct.

Point is, byebye seasonal affective disorder, hello a month straight of chilling outside. The music festival Popadelica wrote in a recent Facebook status, “Förresten, sa vi att vi bokat solen till Popadelica 2011 också? Det har vi.” (“Btw, did we mention we’ve booked the sun for Popadelica 2011? Well we did.”) NICE.

Only bummed that I’m leaving too soon for midsommar and the midnight sun…