Facebook

Biking in the States

On Monday, I biked to Facebook and back. Since I left early, it was cold. Very cold. Belgium cold. What’s worse though, is the state of biking. There’s no such thing as separate biking lanes here, like in Belgium. If there are bike lanes, then they’re simply part of a super wide parking lane. Far from safe.
But I knew that. I could deal with that.

Plus, there are a few bike trails (many for such a small region by U.S. standards, it appears). So what can go wrong?

These bike trails are nice, very nice, even somewhat idyllic during daytime, but at night, they’re absolutely horrible. What I did not anticipate, was the complete lack of lighting on these bicycle trails. Sure, there is no risk of you getting hit by a car. But there’s all the more risk of you hitting a pedestrian, or that pedestrian’s dog. (Yes, that actually almost happened…)

There are maybe five street lanterns along several kilometers of bike trail. And to be fair, those few street lanterns serve little more purpose than a lighthouse-at-land.

This workweek was rather uneventful. I just worked very hard on pushing my project forward.

On Wednesday, I got a ride home by a colleague (travel time of 10 minutes instead of ±55…). He gave me a ride home before. This time he brought his other car.
A casual Porsche.

So I mentioned the commute to and from Facebook by public transport. I used to take the bus¹. It averages 55 minutes (doorstep to doorstep, so including walking).
Ever since moving in to my suite, now two weeks ago, I’d been taking the bus. That’s about 2 hours per day. Gone.
I hate wasting time. I hate it when a site takes 200 milliseconds longer to load than it should. Needless to say, I really hated this massive waste of time.

On the Tuesday of the second week, I started feeling very much at home here in the sunny Silicon Valley.

Not because the mobile phone reception is so poor here and because that reminds me of my parents’ place, which is probably the only spot in a wide area where you’re guaranteed to lose reception when you drive by.
The reception is very poor here though, apparently especially on AT&T’s network, with calls being dropped very frequently — I saw it happen three times with my own eyes.
That’s right, you peeps in Belgium envying me because I’m in Silicon Valley. It turns out that in Silicon Valley of all places, mobile reception is worse than in Belgium! (Although, when it works, mobile internet is much faster here.)

I failed to mention this in the blog post about my first week here, but at the Zen Hotel, I’ve also had the worst Wi-Fi access ever.

And more than once, my Skype video calls to my girlfriend back home from within the Facebook offices have been dropped. Call quality is generally pretty poor. ¹

Orientation at Facebook

While I obviously can’t publish the details here, the orientation was very cool. The guy who was doing orientation was very energetic and enthusiastic, and this definitely had a positive effect. He explained how the company functions (flatness for the win!), the rationale behind some of its core technologies and products.

What’s also very amazing, is that he’d only been there for 4 months!
In fact, as you talk to more and more Facebook employees, you’ll learn that most of them have actually joined in the past year or so. It’s amazing. It’s also very strange if you’re not used to the start-up culture and the optimistic atmosphere that’s seemingly inherent to Silicon Valley.

In the afternoon, we got our laptops (either MacBook Pros or Lenovo Thinkpads) and phones (iPhones, although you can request an Android device later on). Quite impressive, seeing dozens of new devices lined up in rows and waiting to be used productively.

After the orientation was wrapped up (which included a tour of the headquarters), there was a Happy Hour (i.e. beer), which I skipped to go and meet my manager, Okay Zed, and the rest of the Site Speed team.

Saying goodbye

I didn’t expect the goodbye to be easy, but I never expected it to be so hard, either. I think it was one of the hardest things I ever did, on that 23rd of September, 2011.

I was going to miss my friends and family back home, but that’s absolutely nothing in comparison with the goodbye to Anneleen (my girlfriend — she’s awesome!). It was very hard. We barely managed. I wish I could’ve taken her with me. The only way we managed was by telling ourselves that it’s too big an (career) opportunity to pass on, and that the experience I’d gain at Facebook would help my career and thus us for the rest of our lives.

The flight

Facebook booked the flight with British Airways. I’m used to flying with lowcost airlines such as Ryan Air, Brussels Airlines, and so on; so I expect to have to pay for everything.

Well, that simply doesn’t apply to British Airways. The flight booked for me by Facebook’s travel agent to London was in Economy class, but the one to San Francisco was in “Club World class”¹. More about that later.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining Facebook’s Site Speed team in Palo Alto, California on September 26, 2011 for a 12-week internship!

After almost two months of being in contact with Facebook, I finally got the liberating call with the verdict yesterday evening: I’ve been accepted!

Backstory {#backstory}

For those of you who want to read it, here’s the full backstory.

Excitement {#excitement}

On February 24, I was contacted via the contact form on my website by Jason Sobel of Facebook. He’s a member of the Site Speed team and mentioned their article about BigPipe (which is the technology they developed to make Facebook load twice as fast). Apparently he had come across my master thesis and my website (i.e. this website) and was interested in my work on making websites faster. Jason asked if I was up for a chat some time to find out what I’ve been working on and so he could give a sense of what the Facebook Site Speed team does. There even was a mention of possibly joining Facebook: “maybe our team would be an interesting opportunity for you?”.