Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

It’s 11:45pm on a Friday night, and I’m in the CSE labs.  My partner and I just finished our huge networks project (that I’ll describe in a future post).  This made me realize … this is my last evening of grinding away in the CSE labs.  I’ve had a large amount of very late nights in these labs, and I’m going to miss my time spent in them.

This post was written on Monday, February 18, 2008.

I’m writing while in my compact airplane seat on my flight back to Seattle from Denver, Colorado. I spent the last four nights in Boulder visiting my two best high school friends. I had such an awesome time in Boulder that I wanted to share my story.

This plane ride marks the end of my third trip to Boulder, but this trip was exceedingly better than my previous trips. I got some quality time in with my two friends that I miss a lot, and I got a good opportunity to really soak up the town in all of its wonderfulness.

First, the weather
It snows in Boulder a fair amount, and often when it doesn’t snow it’s sunny and relatively warm. This feeling of contrast is as beautiful as the feeling you get when being splashed by a cool ocean wave after laying in the sweltering sun for an extended period of time. You get to enjoy the fun of being snowed on, while only days later you can enjoy a game of shirtless outdoor sports at the nearby park. I love it.

Second, the food. Third, the food
I could name at least 10 different food joints that are open until at least 2:00am. I would say that 80% of these joints offer unique, unbelievable food such as joints (mini-calzones), cinna-sticks, and steak-and-chee (sandwiches). The other 20% offer the basics – pizza, sandwiches, etc. All 100% of these joints are cheap. Dirt cheap. We bought 30 wings, four tacos, and a pitcher of good beer for $25. Boulder is filled with insanely good eats that are cheap and open late. What more could a college student ask for? Oh yeah, most of them deliver.

Fourth, the people
I find myself to be much more like the people that I’ve met in Boulder than the people I’ve met in Seattle. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the people around me in Seattle. No. In Seattle I’m surrounded by really good, fun, smart people, and I’m not trying to say that people in Seattle are inferior. I’m saying they’re different, as almost all inhabitants of a unique city are. I’m making the very general claim that I have more in common with the people I’ve met in Colorado. For example, most of my friends in Colorado, new and old, are goofy. They wear cowboy outfits to the cowboy bar, or they make odd gestures while riding the mechanical bull. They dance like morons when no one else is dancing, and they sing along to all the most rocking songs. When I wear my big blue flannel in Seattle, I get referred to as “Lumberjack Alex.” If I wear my big blue flannel in Boulder, I get complimented on how awesome it is. When I sing to a song and play air guitar to a song while in Seattle, I generally get weird looks. If I do the same in Colorado, then I’m usually joined by a collection of my friends in a multi-part, off-key harmony.

Fifth, the skiing
The mountains 90-minutes away from Boulder are great (Vail, Copper, Breckenridge, Keystone, A-Basin, etc). They offer multi-mountain, cheap seasons passes to college students, and most mountains have great terrain. I like Mammoth better, but I think it’s safe to claim that the Colorado resorts are better than Washington resorts (Stevens, Crystal, etc), except for maybe the exception of Baker.

Sixth, the school
The University of Colorado offers so many more services to its students than the University of Washington; it’s disgusting. They have a Buff Bus that busses students around so they don’t have to walk alone late at night in the often-cold weather. CU makes it easy for their students to eat well and get exercise, while the UW doesn’t provide carpool discounts for the gym parking lot past 3:00pm. I feel that these points I’m making are slightly out of scope, so I’ll leave it at that. I will say that my trip to Boulder has motivated me to begin writing a post about ways the UW could improve, so stay tuned for that. And, to UW’s credit, I think its academics are generally better.

If you have friends in Boulder, then go visit them. You’ll have an awesome time in an awesome college town. I definitely did.

TechCrunch just announced that Yahoo will be switching all of its search infrastructure to Hadoop. Hadoop is the technology taught in the University of Washington distributed computing course.

More on awesome UW CSE classes.

The University of Washington CSE department is offering yet another awesome class that I pounced on thanks to the recommendation by two friends, Jim and Sierra. First they offered a joint class with Google on distributed computing, including topics and projects on Hadoop, MapReduce, GFS, etc. Now I’m taking a class focussed on computing for developing parts of the world. This quarter is focussed on defining a problem and a mechanism for fixing it. Next quarter is focussed on solving that problem by making whatever devices, services, and products necessary for success.

I took this class in direct response to this former post of mine, because now I get a chance to work on a project that might actually help someone who truly needs help.  I’ll describe our project later once we have our heads wrapped around it more.

I’ve been working part-time for Redfin and taking a full course load since September ‘07. It’s been hard. Recently I realized that my productivity at work has decreased an insane amount, and I think that I’ve known about this for a while now. I’m not sure why I never acted on it. My big boss, Bryan, called me out on it, and I’m really glad he did. Since his call out, my productivity has gone up a lot - at least I think it has ;). I wanted to shine some light on the difficulties of being a part-time product manager (PM) while taking a full course load.

You need to context switch. While I’m focusing on classes, either in class or while working on assignments, I have lots of things bouncing around in my head. I’m thinking about due dates, action items, exams, and everything else a student worries about. When I’m focusing on work, I need to be consumed with schedules, wireframes, work status, bug counts, and everything else that a PM worries about. For the first few months of my part-time work, I let myself focus on school projects and HST concerns far too often while at work. I always have a lot of things going on, but I would think and act on non-work related things at work far too often. Part of the reason for this was because my schedule didn’t really allow me to have much non-school and non-work time during the day. For example, if I needed to meet with a professor or an adviser, I would have to schedule my appointments right after my classes, forcing me to show up to work late. Sometimes I would even have to schedule phone calls (interviews) during work hours. Again, you need to context switch. What I mean by that is that you have to have times of the day when you do school work, and times of the day when you’ll do work. You can’t try to mix the two. You have to take all the shit going on in your head during school and put it away when you’re at work. You have to take all the shit going on in your head during work and put it away when you’re at school. You can’t mix these things. If you do mix them as I did, you won’t be efficient at either.

Checking your personal email at work periodically can also be deadly. Occasionally I would see important emails in my gmail box and act on them while at work. Bad idea. Checking your email at work makes it easy to mix work with other things, which mixes your thoughts up too much.

In summary, do work when you’re at work, and don’t do work when you’re working on school/projects/etc. If you set barriers between school and work and stick to them, you’ll be much more efficient and productive. Think about these barriers when scheduling interviews, appointments, and when scheduling your classes.