Hasselt University

mail@domain.tld

This week, I finally got around to reporting an issue that has been bothering me for a long time on Facebook. In fact, it’s the reason I initially refused to register at Facebook (after I was finally convinced I’d sign up for my first social network site ever): my e-mail address was being refused. It appears that e-mail addresses of the form mail@domain.tld are simply refused, because this is typically a spamtrap. Since Facebook obviously doesn’t want its emails to be marked as spam, they’re very cautious to not send e-mails to these kinds of addresses, even if users attempt to register with such addresses.

Unfortunately, it means that an out-of-band verification system is necessary, such as adding a DNS CNAME record or adding a file to your domain’s root with a specific filename (which is what e.g. Google Webmaster Tools requires). Fortunately, I found at leat one other Facebook employee who wants to see this happen. Now I only need to find the time to implement it…

“My cousin ain’t your cousin”

A friend also reported the incorrect translation for “cousin” and “nephew” in the Dutch version of Facebook. The problem is that there’s apparently a big semantical difference between Dutch and English.

Monday was the first day after Anneleen left. Obviously a sad day. Plus, due to the lack of sleep the night before she left, I was still feeling very tired.

I also got entirely fed up with the endless piles of rice being served. Both at lunch and dinner, the food would essentially look the same: one or two kinds of rice, combined with peas/string beans, some kind of tofu and some kind of meat. The meat is almost impossible to eat most of the time because we only have plastic cutlery. I only see potatoes about once a week. Rice, rice, rice, always rice! I — and my digestive tract — am accustomed to potatoes. Yup, that’s how we Belgians roll.
Note that all of this only applies to the kitchen in the 1050 building. The 1601 building has proper cutlery and more varying ingredients. But I’d lose about 20 minutes by going there and back again every time.
Since I still had this problem after 6 weeks, it didn’t seem like my body was going to adjust any time soon, I figured I’d just change my diet.

So, hoping my digestive system would cope better this way, I started eating cereals at lunch (Alpha Bits¹). I also got some very nice (seedless!) Californian grapes at Whole Foods, of which I ate a bunch every night as a movie snack.

This week at Facebook

Facebook, or well, my manager, graciously allowed me to take two days off — I believe in large part because I had been working so hard in the first 5 weeks of my internship. It was especially welcome because we had already lost a full day. So I took the day off on Tuesday (the last day of good weather that week!) and on Friday.

On Wednesday, there was Facebook’s Engineering Summit, where the major new tools, systems, APIs and whatnot where presented. They do this because Facebook has grown so large and there are so many teams, that it is impossible to know on a company-wide scale what is being worked on. So an event like this enables software engineers to leverage as many of these novelties as much as possible, for maximum impact.
Clearly, this is a major cost for Facebook, to put hundreds of engineers together in one room and pay them to not work. They’re simply confident that this will pay off.

On the remaining two days, I presented my initial deep analysis (based on the patterns found by my project) on Facebook Groups’ performance to somebody of the Groups team, dived deeper into this and worked on several non-project related tasks, including instrumentation for Facebook’s photo tagging functionality.

On Monday — Halloween! — there was also some Halloween-themed food at Facebook:

Work hard, play hard

This week, I worked very hard to get as much work done as possible — as I did the preceding weeks, but with renewed energy and focus — before Anneleen would arrive Saturday that week.

I focused mostly on getting “meaningful” (in that they lead to new, unknown insights) test results from my work so far, because I must be able to convince my manager and colleagues of its potential. Otherwise, it won’t be used and my project may be suspended.
I was not able to produce much test results because I encountered several problems with analyzing the data sets, which were less clean and more skewed in certain ways than anticipated. So I focused on adding features that enable us to deal with these challenges.
Amongst others, I added the ability to perform pattern mining on a subset of the data by allowing “item constraints” (“filtering”, really: “only consider samples that do or don’t contain X”) to be defined for the parser, not just for the pattern miner. This allows one to focus on a subset of the data that may otherwise have been skewed.

Anneleen!

Unfortunately, Anneleen’s plane to San Francisco got cancelled due to (repeated) technical problems, so she got stuck in Frankfurt (I will spare you the whole United Airlines ordeal). Thus, I had another day to fill. So I decided to pay a visit to Stanford!

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.

On July 1, 2011, I successfully defended my master thesis at Hasselt University’s Expertise Centre for Digital Media. As usual, it’s very hard to compress the entire spectrum of interesting things to explain in the small allowed period of time that we’re allotted (15 minutes this time). I spent a lot of time polishing my presentation to make sure it was as understandable as possible (despite the fast talking pace), but also as interesting as possible. And apparently it paid off!

Afterwards, I received a lot of very positive feedback my presentation from those attending the defense presentation. Fortunately, the content itself was also deemed interesting and solid: I received a score of 80% (16/20)! I’m of course very satisfied with this result :)

However, it doesn’t end here…

Update August 16, 21:30 CET

Now that Steve Souders tweeted about this, I think it’s necessary to link from this post to important related information: