summer update i

short post

• living alone in south bay has been better than i expected! on weekdays i get lots of personal space after work, and on weekends i commute to visit people in sf and elsewhere. mountain view and sf are 1.5 hours away on the caltrain, which is a bit of a pain, but the distance is also good because it forces me to plan out my weekends better and because there’s way too much happening in sf all the time. if i were living in the city i think it would be very distracting
• i went to a writing club last weekend. it was a fun way of meeting people interested in writing, but they spent more time chatting than actually doing the writing, which was a bit of a disappointment for me. i think tech people often don’t appreciate how much time and focus it takes to write well, and instead assume it’s something they can just “execute well” whenever they feel like it? this is just speculation though
• work has been very good! i don’t think i’ve ever learned cs as rapidly as i am right now (though maybe 2020 web.lab comes close). c++ is tricky but the combination of copilot, clangd, and working in the same room as experts mean that i’ve become reasonably fluent in the language much faster than i expected. it has only been 2 weeks and i have learned a lot about memory management and allocators, gpu programming and cuda streams, macros, curiously recurring templates, how pytorch and tensorflow are actually implemented, ownership and smart pointers, and how to use threads / locks / condition variables more effectively
• on the first day of work, the cto was assembling my work table as i walked in; i think that was when i realized this would be a very different experience from any of my previous jobs. i haven’t gotten to talk to my coworkers much about their personal lives because there is so much work to discuss, but i am fine with that; i’m quite skeptical of work environments where your coworkers become your best friends anyway
• i should be close to done with my main internship project; i think my boss miscalibrated a bit because he expected me learning c++ to take longer, and also didn’t expect me reading 6.033 computer systems/6.172 performance engineering lecture notes to translate into writing real code as well as it has. i am pretty excited to wrap up because afterwards i should be able to spend the rest of the summer working on the system components that interest me the most
• i am not sure how i feel about work-life balance right now. i’m in the office from 9-7 on weekdays, so i have a few hours after work to do other stuff. but i’m pretty focused on writing software during the 10 hours in the office, so afterwards i’m not in the mood to think about more code or work on technical projects in general. i usually just end up reading or writing or wasting time, which is not terrible, but it feels somewhat bad that the only technical work i am doing is for exafunction. this is one of my main reservations about going back full time – that it seems difficult to do or learn technical things unrelated to work; the other reservation is that it’s in-person in mountain view
• somehow i didn’t realize until now that the bart (bay area rapid transit) goes underwater! i think usually when train lines need to cross a body of water they accomplish this by taking over part of a bridge (eg. boston and nyc subways both do this). in the case of sf, i guess none of the existing bridges aligned well with the bart stations, so they built tunnels spanning the narrowest parts of the bay with the immersed tube technique. very scary to think about
• i’ve been thinking about writing a blog post on a subject i’ve been struggling with for a while. it is the first blog idea in a long time where the thought of sharing the post on the internet actually scares me; naturally this means i will probably share it widely eg. on the admissions blog and social media. i am including this paragraph to make myself commit to actually writing it. hopefully it comes soon