Tuesday, May 5

Woke up at 7:10. Coffee, cookie. Good coffee – the beans have finally arrived from Bottomless. 

Let it be the bike day! The day was gonna be warm and sunny. Omega-3, L-Carnitine. Then what. Replied to a couple of messages, pumped the bike tires, prepared a change for the office, and it was almost 9 already. 

The bike commute was pleasant: happy people biking, jogging, walking their dogs, playing tennis at Riverside park. To the right – Hudson River, to the left – Riverside park trees, then Upper West Side Art Deco changing to the midtown all glass skyscrapers. 65ºF/18ºC and sunny morning. It took 46 minutes – exactly the same as the subway. 

I got to the office by 10:15; I changed my bike clothes and then discovered that Abhi was back in the office. He was good, nothing bad happened; good. Then we talked with Abhi for another 20 minutes – he’s a talkative dude. I realized I was getting lonely in this office last week when he was out. Hanif is quick to the point, and somewhat shy, like myself, but also not sharing much; he asks something on his mind and listens, but is too shy to engage and tell me what he really thinks about the bullshit that I’m telling him. Paula, sitting just across the aisle from me, is rather talking non-stop – on the headset, but not with me. She asks me about my weekend, but before I even open my mouth she tells me she’s gotta run to another meeting and runs to her desk before I close my mouth. Her life looks fast; I’m just too slow for a conversation with her. Then there is the invisible man: he’s a chameleon in his cubicle. He either works from home too often, or his sweater is of color of his cubicle. I never heard a sound from him, and I don’t know what team he is from. There are of course more people not from my team on the floor.

I started to work on a new small project related to cost reduction from sending SMS. As it turns out it’s quite pricey sending those SMS. One cent per message, multiplied by millions, go figure. So I will need to change some flows to send emails instead. Ask users in the app for emails when we don’t have one. I looked into SNS queues, Lambda, and TypeScript Lambda scripts that use DynamoDB. Not too excited about this project but alright.

I biked back home by 6. Downtown was gorgeous: everyone was outside. On the street: poor people trapped in their Ferraris and BMWs moving 3 miles per hour on average. On the bike lane: crème de la crème, the best of society, – models, ballerinas, politicians, power-hungry Wall street guys biking in suits, actors, athletes, designers, entrepreneurs, – happy and moving bike lane.