Monday, June 3

 I’m not following Matthew Walker’s advice from his book: not getting up at the same time every day, even on the weekends. I want my extra hour or two on weekends. On Saturday I got up at 9, and on Sunday at 10. If not going to Boston on Wednesday I would’ve worked from home, so I wouldn’t have to get up early on Monday for the 9:30 standup, but the plan was to work from Cambridge on Thursday and Friday, so I got up by 7:40 and headed to the office – not an easy Monday!

Abhi was in the office already: we chatted about my picnic in Central Park and his Ikea wardrobe assembling over the weekend. During the standup I demoed my recent work, email receipts UI, which is almost done except for the Android. The change may sound weird at first: for the first five tickets we don’t ask the email (to avoid “cognitive overload” for new users) – we just send SMS; on the fifth ticket, we ask for an email for receipts and stop sending SMS. It sounded strange to me the first time I heard of this flow, but now I like it: we don’t bother new users with everything on the first step, and then we do gather emails for more accustomed users. Sunny said it wouldn’t save us money if we asked for the 5th ticket cause most people buy just one ticket. We argued for a bit, and then I promised to gather some stats on this question.

Meanwhile, our SMS spammers are back, despite disabling the developer configuration (“localhost”). XK is at the top now; turned out it’s the code for Kosovo. And Sri Lanka, again; Sunny said we can’t ban Sri Lanka cause of the cricket World Cup taking place in NYC. India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – that is where cricket is super popular. I ran my script and showed we sold 0 tickets to Sri Lanka phone numbers. But Sunny said no, still no, it’s cricket world cup. We’ll ban them in two weeks.

Then I was just getting started with Android. Fighting IntelliJ, then turned out I needed Android Studio – I thought those were the same things.

Kenny started. They put his desk somewhere far away on the other side of the building; but on the first floor. We chatted with Abhi and him for a while. He saw my book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"; he's reading it too. He seemed cool: communicative and geeky too in the right balance. I'm increasingly liking my team.

In the evening we were buying tickets to Boston for Wednesday.