Thursday, June 6 A Day in Cambridge

[soid]

 I woke up by 8 – B was dressed up in business casual for her day of the meetings. It was unusual to see something other than her normal remote worker Zoom outfit. 

I went to a nearby cafe called Bōm Dough: there were people with laptops inside and that was what I was looking for. The cafe had a menu of breakfast sandwiches in their own baked bread and that turned out delicious. One of the breads offered was called “pão de queijo” – it tasted like sticky rice kind of flour but apparently it was wheat. They added Cheese, it turned out; it was Brazilian. The cafe had a large white space, and many chairs, and most people were on their laptops. “Weekend computer snooze,” – a poster on the wall friendly said, – “no screen time during weekends”. Neat, what I say. I remember Berlin in 2010s where opening a laptop in a cafe was alike burping in a public space – socially enforced by subtle social control. That time in Berlin the owner came to me and said I should better enjoy my life and have a conversation, or read a good book, but the laptop was bad for me; that kind of bullshit teaching of how to live instead of asking straight not to use laptops. Now it says “weekend computer snooze” much more gently with the same outcome.

There in the cafe, I got a hang of tedious reloading steps on Android, and after that writing the code was not hard, as far as I could properly reload and test it. There I finished the changes for Android.

Typical Cambridge.

I checked out a public library trying to find a place for a meeting. That was all of glass, new, and next to a middle school. They had meeting rooms there, but turned out a need a local library card to book it. So I headed back to AirBnb for the meeting.

1:1 with Will went pretty well compared to the previous one when we cut the meeting short, partially because I didn’t prepare much to ask, and partially because I was unexpectedly hurt by his feedback. This time I prepared a bunch of questions to ask, and we had a conversation. Will is not sharing much, only asking what’s on my mind. I praised his design for email receipts and asked him about his process of coming up with such ideas – he said he likes just writing down the decision process, starting with various users and thinking of how different decisions affect the users; or something like that. Then he said he liked my data analysis this week, and how I emphasized how different decisions reflect in the costs. So we praised each other and went back to work.

Then I went to another library not far from Harvard Square and worked on implementing Ryan’s CR comments. The library was next to a high school – it seems all public libraries here are next to schools. Cambridge Ridge & Latin School, it’s called – turned out Ben Affleck and Matt Damon graduated from it. But the library building was new, all of glass, like a co-working space with lots of books around. A ponytailed guy in “JuliaCon 2020” t-shirt was coding something, getting up and walking thinking of something, and then getting back to coding. Did I see him in Cambridge the last time I came here? Or it’s a Cambridge type?

Cambridge in 2024 feels like New York in 2020: while all New York of 2024 is all about Free Palestine, in Cambridge it’s still Black Lives Matter. Cambridge Ridge & Latin School.

Cambridge Public Library.

I met up with B after 6. She looked tired and didn’t talk much. We grabbed a pho near the square – it was comforting. B said she was still "processing" the day and didn't talk much. We grabbed a bottle of Georgian wine called "Saperavi" – the wine guy was telling me it's from a region of the oldest wine cultivation in the world – and then I tried to figure out how B's first meeting with remote coworkers went. Of course, silence meant she had something to complain about. "I want to go back to New York already," – she said. I was the opposite, having a great day in libraries, having fixed damn Android.