The trip to California was a great success! The code sprint was fun and we saw everything we wanted to see in San Francisco. We arrived on friday the 30th of January after over 15 hours of travel. As soon as we walked out of the airport, I forgot all about being tired from the long flights as a great view opened up in front of us and I felt the warmth of the sunshine (which felt a bit weird after not seeing the sun in a long time in the middle of finnish winter). After that we brought our stuff to the hotel and went to the San Francisco city center to eat. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake as the taxi was quite expensive since there was some traffic going into the city, and on top of that the burger I chose to eat didn’t even have much taste to it. We went back by train and that was the end of the first day. The rest of the weekend we were at the code sprint in the Facebook HQ and the next week from monday to friday we toured around San Francisco.

The code sprint

At 8am on saturday we were transported to the Facebook HQ in Menlo Park in nice buses. The event started by everyone in the team introducing themselves. Our table was the biggest one there. I think there were almost 20 of us + 3 mentors, so our long table was quite full. After everyone had arrived and introduced themselves, the mentors went around the table asking people if they had gotten their work environment set up, but it turned out a lot of people hadn’t. So the first part of the day went by as we waited for the mentors to help everyone get set up. The ones who had their work environment ready tried to look for some issues to solve. We also tried but didn’t really find any. Luckily a tour of the facebook HQ had been arranged, so we went on that as we still had nothing else to do. Their HQ is really fantastic. It has everything. A lot of food places, an arcade, healthcare, everything. It’s like a little town. We didn’t get to go inside many of the buildings, but we got to see the arcade and the wall on which you could write your name on. Throughout the day we also got a lot of tasty food and there were shelves of snacks and drinks from which you could take as much as you wanted. Later in the day we finally got something to do. Kati had talked to the mentors about our situation, and Aaron Patterson (the mentor who interacted with us the most) came to give us a real task. It wasn’t just a bug/issue either, but a real feature, which was something that we were hoping for. The task we got was to implement eager loading of view templates in production mode, so it isn’t a very simple task. It will probably take us two or three weeks to finish it. On sunday we tried to figure out which parts of the code we need to start looking at, and we actually got it figured out quite well with the help of Aaron. Other things we did on the last day were taking pictures in front of the facebook like sign and watching the super bowl on the big screen as some of the other participants wanted to watch it. I tried to watch it a bit as well but didn’t really understand it as I don’t know any of the rules. Not much else happened on the last day. We finished around 8pm, took some snacks and drinks with us and went back to the hotel. All in all the event was a great experience and I’m grateful to Facebook for arranging it.

San Francisco

On the first day after the code sprint we went to our hotels in the city and started sightseeing. First we went to Fisherman’s Wharf, which is a touristy place with a lot of shops, museums and stuff. There we visited pier 39, which is home to a lot of sea lions, and ate at In-n-Out Burger. This time the burger was a bit tastier. After Fisherman’s Wharf we went to see the Golden Gate Bridge. There we took a lot of pictures and walked to the first tower. As we walked to the bridge the sun was setting, so when we got there it was dark and the view from the bridge into the city was quite stunning with all the lights and a full moon. Sadly the cameras on my phone or tablet aren’t that great so I couldn’t take a great picture of the view since it was too dark.
On the second day we visited the Alcatraz, in which we saw one of the few remaining former prisoners, took an audio tour of the main prison building and a guided tour about the history of the place. There were quite a lot of people there even though it’s not even the tourist season. On wednesday we took an uber car to Muir Woods, which is a forest with old and tall redwood trees. We hiked there for a few kilometers. It was quite a nice hike even though my feet were hurting quite bad from all the walking on previous days. I liked the woods more than I did Alcatraz.

On the last day we climbed to a place called Twin Peaks, which has a great view of the city. A nice spot for a last look at San Francisco. In the evening we still went back to Fisherman’s Wharf to get some souvenirs and eat at In-n-Out again. This time the burgers were even better as Juho instructed us how to order the right kind of a burger. We also bought a burger for a homeless guy that was dreaming about a double double burger, he looked quite hungry. On friday afternoon we left San Francisco just as the weather was turning bad. We were lucky to have awesome weather during the week since it’s usually the rainy season this time of year. I still haven’t gotten used to the cold weather back here in Finland.