soid

Caught the empty train at 9:06; drank my coffee and browsed the phone, as everyone else on the train, instead of reading a book. I couldn’t read books for the past week; too much going on in my head; my mind is craving short attention span entertainment. Looking forward to my life back to normal. I get contended and bored; I open a book and focus on the line; the line follows a line, all becomes a melody, rhymed with the sound of the train, drawing a story, as I become engrossed in the book on the busy subway train, where everyone is sleepily looking at their phone. But not now: now I’m looking at my phone.

10am usual weekly standup. The big one, which is actually when everyone sits around the table. I said I’m waiting for code review. Will said why don’t we set a deadline for the first deployment for this on Friday. I said why not; it’s mostly ready. 

Then another standup, where I explained some intricacies with the GTFS-RT feed, when the train is removed too early, before it even arrived at the station.

Then an hour of work and we had a big team lunch with burritos. I ended up in the middle of a hot conversation about old computers like Atari and Apple 2. I brought up ZX Spectrum and turned out Ken has one. Ken is 22. He’s obsessed with old computers and programs for Spectrum on the weekends. He told me there is reversed reversed-engineered Spectrum from Russia called Pentagon that he wants to get in his collection. I said Russians now trying to acquire any chips from the West will be very surprised if he’s trying to ship Russian chips.

Then another standup with Sunny, Glen, Dave, and Ken. The agenda was to figure out how we deploy by Friday. Well, I don’t exactly get it: it’s mostly ready. If we fail, we should plan for failure, plan how we debug quickly and fix, and iterate. Everyone seemed too nervous. Was I too naive?

Then Sunny reported to Will, and they discussed it. They then invited Ken and me. Will was all over, gave Ken a test plan for 3 weeks at least, then jumped to discussing memory and CPU. Ken just nodded and said sure sure. So that was the fourth meeting in the day about the same thing. But I only got it the next day. The elections anxiety. I get it.

I worked some more, but not much with all the meetings. In the evening I went to watch some trains. Recorded the signal and the timing for stop and start. Then headed home.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5

I thought I’d go to the office on the election day since I voted early anyway, and since staying home on Wednesday after a sleepless night is more convenient. Will and Sunny were in the office, and T and S, and most people out. 

I focused pretty well during the day. Trying to set up a test bench with my recorded signal from another day. That’s a lot of data massaging. Claud.ai is so smart and helpful. Writing me scripts that I used to spend hours on. 

Around 3 Will came by and asked me about my conversations with EE last week. Then he just called him and invited me, and then he didn’t know what exactly his asking. I went to his table. Sunny showed me a diagram with plans. That looked like a great plan. Replacing GTFS. Feeding Itrac. Wow, that’s great. And then Will said: “We’ll place our system in the center of everything, so then we get a …” – he couldn’t find a word – “then we get …” – he pointed to me – “What do we get?” I said: “we get leverage.” (Only later I thought about the more interesting answer to this question) Will took a moment to think: “Yes, leverage. We get leverage.” But before that, we have to replace the beacons. Sunny was complaining about Cuomo: this stupid push to place displays at every station before the elections; it had cost this organization so much money, and so much tech debt. We started drawing trains on paper; trains arrive, there are trains behind, so many combinations. Will gave me a pencil and paper too and asked to take points; then he realized he didn’t have another pencil. I went to my desk and picked up a pencil. We drew a bunch of test cases; Sunny was good at it – what if there is a train behind and the train ends the trip and stays at the station, not leaving, and there is another one on the middle track. We came up with a bunch. I said that I’m thinking differently about it; I’m thinking in principle: a train, it can move, a track, it can hold one train, a signal, can come from anywhere. Then Will took away my page and said he had to think about it. I left and heard him cursing reading an email from Br. For months they delayed the project and couldn’t make buses send the pings every 5 seconds instead of every 30 seconds. We ask them for an update every couple of weeks. This time Br said they overloaded their inference servers and needed to test ARM-based AWS servers to see if it’s cheaper to maintain the load. Will was mad. What a boloney, indeed. 

In the evening I grabbed a wine and prepared for the election results. Everything was crazy outside. Lots of homeless out of nowhere. Lots of crazies. Is it what Pueblo excitement looks like? B was at home watching everything on YouTube. I said she needed to save the energy for late night. But she dozed off by 11. I stayed watching the nytimes indicator moving from pink to pinker. I was in denial. It was exactly like 2016. Dejavu. By 3 I finished the wine and watched Trump’s speech. I didn’t see him for at least four years. I watched the speech entirely. It started quite lively. Turned out this guy Vance is married to a desi girl. He pointed to his family and friends and put some of them on the spot. And then he started telling stories; those stories felt like an old man that gets you trapped and tells you stories, and you want to escape, but you can’t escape; but I could just stop watching YouTube. But I kept watching. Did it look like 2016? No. He sounded older. He sounded tremendously boring. They played YMCA. I went to bed.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Woke up by 10. B was up talking to her manager. Something about China and Texas, and she was talking and talking, and I thought wtf is she talking about it. I put my headphones in and looked in the chat. The chat was empty. 

It was empty until about 11. First Glen asked to confirm deployment on Thursday. It’ll be fine, I said. We’ll fail; we’ll fix it quickly; we’ll iterate. It’s fine. We’re not sending man to space, I said. Though I could send one man to space, I was about to say, but it was so-so kind of a joke and I skipped. Then nothing. I was talking to Claud.ai to make Python scripts, then opened them in Cursor to modify even more all the shit that Claud wrote. It’s like programming by code reviewing.

By 4 I got more than upset – I got hungry. The chat was still empty. I talked to AI. I finally decided to go eat something. The street was gorgeous. Nobody cared. It was 78ºF and sunny. Lots of people on the street. Life goes on. Is it always like that, or am I just noticing? Lots of kids running, lots of beautiful people. I walked back and forth. Ramen was closed till 5. I didn’t know what to eat. I ate a sandwich.

Then worked on a bench. Made my test replay all the signals and compute the error. That took twice longer to implement than I thought. Not too bad.

Then on the bench it finally hit me. All the doubts; all worries. Was it even worth it? Did I make a big mistake somewhere? This country is about simplicity. They want simple things. They will not understand anyway. It is all a waste. And why am I even bothering anyway.

I called G from the same bench. It was nice hearing him. He said if you know a person when they are 13, they don’t really change by 40; it’s funny – they are just the same as when you knew them when they were 13.

I went home and worked till 10, until I finally fixed the beacon sensitivity issue for tomorrow’s deployment.

Standup at 10 with everyone. Sunny was there; on his first day. Now the dilemma is how do we distinguish two Sunnys. I turned the last name "Ng" which is normally pronounced as "ein", but in Cantonese it would sound more like "uhh" as in an interjection.

Then meeting with Ken. I showed him how to run our project in IntelliJ, how he can debug his first project with tests, etc. He wrote a bunch of Python so far for exploring the data; now needs to bring the Python algorithm to Kotlin backend. We discussed a bit how to bridge those two works. In my mind I think of "converting," of course, Ken to Kotlin religion. But no rush on that. He's doing well.

Then lunch with the new Sunny and our team. We can't agree on where to eat anymore: some want to eat outside, for others, the weather in the 50s is too cold, for others the food court is "too bougie" (I simply say it's overpriced and not as good). We ended up grabbing food from different places and going to the tip of Manhattan overlooking the rivers and the helicopter landing spot. I always remember "Succession" when see those helicopters. But nobody watched it besides me; it seems nobody watched even "Game of Thrones."

After lunch, I tried to catch up on home tasks. B was finding us an attorney covered by her legal insurance, and a house inspector. The agent SH was freaking out saying the seller thinks we're having second thoughts and asking why we still didn't send an attorney, and that they may change the price unless we sign in soon. That didn't make sense to me: if we can't agree on the price and hold on to it for a few days, how can we trust each other to go through the whole deal? B suspected SH was just rushing us to go with the attorney she recommended. That guy gave us a quote of $3K for processing the deal; it was worth trying to save on it. So I called SH, and told her we needed to find an attorney; she tried to push this guy Sergey again, but I said we wanted to save money by using an insurance-covered attorney. She was telling me the seller will raise the price; if it happens the extra saved money won't matter. Saying things of that sort. I said if they're rushing us into signing I start suspecting what's going on; we still need to check a bunch of things and take our time looking into it. I told her firmly that we were talking time till 2pm the next day. She finally calmed down and said she would let the seller know; that she would do what I say, that she's just warning me.

Then B arranged a conference with an attorney from the insurance, Paul. He was chill; told us that everything was covered by the insurance and that we should send his contact to the seller, and then he would get a bunch of financial documents and review them. He said that kind of buildings are often financially weak, so we should set our expectations pretty low; that may result in maintenance rise or extra fees. Everything took 10 minutes. 

Then I was coding for a couple of hours. Productionizing my debug tool. I didn't expect to use this code at all, so I wrote some shitty code, and so I was prettifying it now. Pretty chill and satisfying task; if it was someone else's shitty code it wouldn't have been as satisfying, but cleaning up my own spaghetti was fun. 

Danny, the loan guy, got back to me after I sent him the address and asked to confirm: he said the rate would be 5.75% instead of 5.25% as we discussed a month ago. Why, I asked. The Fed rate hasn't gone up since September 19, why did they raise it? He said we could bring it down to 5.5% if we use "credit points." What does it mean? He promised to explain in a call on Wednesday.

I left the office by 5:30. I was thinking of watching the trains for some time, but I was too tired. I went back home. B cooked Kung Pao chicken from Trader Joe's. In the evening, I meditated on the numbers and applied to two more loan providers to see their rates. Came to thinking of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich; how he and his depressive family were moving to Petersburg, furnishing the new apartment, being busy it made them happy. A bright spot in his life before another depression.

    И теперь, когда все устроилось так удачно и когда они сходились с женою в цели и, кроме того, мало жили вместе, они так дружно сошлись, как не сходились с первых лет женатой своей жизни. Иван Ильич было думал увезти семью тотчас же, но настояния сестры и зятя, вдруг сделавшимися особенно любезными и родственными к Ивану Ильичу и его семье, сделали то, что Иван Ильич уехал один.

    Иван Ильич уехал, и веселое расположение духа, произведенное удачей и согласием с женой, одно усиливающее другое, все время не оставляло его. Нашлась квартира прелестная, то самое, о чем мечтали муж с женой. Широкие, высокие, в старом стиле приемные комнаты, удобный грандиозный кабинет, комнаты для жены и дочери, классная для сына -- все как нарочно придумано для них. Иван Ильич сам взялся за устройство, выбирал обои, подкупал мебель, особенно из старья, которому он придавал особенный комильфотный стиль, обивку, и все росло, росло и приходило к тому идеалу, который он составил себе. Когда он до половины устроился, его устройство превзошло его ожиданье. Он понял тот комильфотный, изящный и не пошлый характер, который примет все, когда будет готово. Засыпая, он представлял себе залу, какою она будет. Глядя на гостиную, еще не оконченную, он уже видел камин, экран, этажерку и эти стульчики разбросанные, эти блюды и тарелки по стенам и бронзы, когда они все станут по местам. Его радовала мысль, как он поразит Пашу и Лизаньку, которые тоже имеют к этому вкус. Они никак не ожидают этого. В особенности ему удалось найти и купить дешево старые вещи, которые придавали всему особенно благородный характер. Он в письмах своих нарочно представлял все хуже, чем есть, чтобы поразить их. Все это так занимало его, что даже новая служба его, любящего это дело, занимала меньше, чем он ожидал. В заседаниях у него бывали минуты рассеянности: он задумывался о том, какие карнизы на гардины, прямые или подобранные. Он так был занят этим, что сам часто возился, переставлял даже мебель, и сам перевешивал гардины. Раз он влез на лесенку, чтобы показать непонимающему обойщику, как он хочет драпировать, оступился и упал, но, как сильный и ловкий человек, удержался, только боком стукнулся об ручку рамы. Ушиб поболел, но скоро прошел. Иван Ильич чувствовал себя все это время особенно веселым и здоровым. Он писал: чувствую, что с меня соскочило лет пятнадцать. Он думал кончить в сентябре, но затянулось до половины октября. Зато было прелестно,-- не только он говорил, но ему говорили все, кто видели.

     В сущности же, было то самое, что бывает у всех не совсем богатых людей, но таких, которые хотят быть похожими на богатых и потому только похожи друг на друга: штофы, черное дерево, цветы, ковры и бронзы, темное и блестящее,-- все то, что все известного рода люди делают, чтобы быть похожими на всех людей известного рода. И у него было так похоже, что нельзя было даже обратить внимание; но ему все это казалось чем-то особенным. Когда он встретил своих на станции железной дороги, привез их в свою освещенную готовую квартиру и лакей в белом галстуке отпер дверь в убранную цветами переднюю, а потом они вошли в гостиную, кабинет и ахали от удовольствия,-- он был очень счастлив, водил их везде, впивал в себя их похвалы и сиял от удовольствия. В этот же вечер, когда за чаем Прасковья Федоровна спросила его, между прочим, как он упал, он засмеялся и в лицах представил, как он полетел и испугал обойщика.

    -- Я недаром гимнаст. Другой бы убился, а я чуть ударился вот тут; когда тронешь -- больно, но уже проходит; просто синяк.

    И они начали жить в новом помещении, в котором, как всегда, когда хорошенько обжились, недоставало только одной комнаты, и с новыми средствами, к которым, как всегда, только немножко -- каких-нибудь пятьсот рублей -- недоставало, и было очень хорошо. Особенно было хорошо первое время, когда еще не все было устроено и надо было еще устраивать: то купить, то заказать, то переставить, то наладить. Хоть и были некоторые несогласия между мужем и женой, но оба так были довольны и так много было дела, что все кончалось без больших ссор. Когда уже нечего было устраивать, стало немножко скучно и чего-то недоставать, но тут уже сделались знакомства, привычки, и жизнь наполнилась.

Woke up after 11 – good sleep!

I read a chapter of The Power Broker about beginning media coverage criticizing Moses' housing projects (Lincoln center, etc).

Organized notes about apartment search: put our viewed apartments from early October and September; then added two number to each listing – down payment and total monthly payment (maintenance + principle).

SH got back and said our offer of $515K was rejected. "The agent called me and said the number is too low and they refused to counter back." Asked me what to do. I proposed $531K or $545K, she said "We can start at $530,000. Let me know your final thoughts." I said okay. Then I was confused if she proposed to go with 530K or she just picked up my number.

I went to bike around 5. Stopped by a new cafe in Harlem: big and spacious and empty. I wrote some more notes there. Then I went to Trader Joe's at 125th. It was big and spacious again, and the line was short. 

In the evening we cooked soba with salmon. Then I played some video games and smoked weed. I baked cornbread. Played some Valhaim, but got a base raid with bats, and didn't know how to fight it, so I stopped. 

I slept by about 2am.

Woke up at 7:30 – easily, then I snoozed the alarm for 10 minutes, then for another 10, and it was 8:20 already. I brewed some coffee, picked up a cookie, then headed to the train. As it turned out there were delays on the subway; the wait for 8 minutes, then getting on the crowded train. The train was crowded, but some seats are still empty, with inconsiderate people taking more space. I kept standing for another couple minutes, then squeezed in on a seat between a relaxed dude and a lady in a dress without sleeves; backpack put on my knees, finally, trying to to bump people with my elbows, I pulled my iPad from the backpack. I continued reading Kotlin in Action; not much new in the book, but refreshing Kotlin idioms, and somewhat enjoying the structure of the book; it’s a good book.

By 9:25 I realized I’m not making it to the standup at 9:30. So I got off Christopher St, exited the subway and ended up on a bench at Stonewall park. I called to the meeting. Everyone was working from home, it seemed from the videos. I promised to get started on reading the bus GPS feed. The temperature was about 65ºF, nice and sunny, I didn’t wanna leave the bench, dreaming of how cool it’d be to live in downtown. I went back to the train.

In the office I started reading the code related to buses; a few data feeds, a few components parsing and merging it. What were I gonna do there I still didn’t know. 

At 11, I got invited to a meeting about project transfer to our team; the beacons train tracking on the B division. That went pretty interesting. The train on Flushing and Canarsie lines are tracked with inches precision (great), but the servers that push the data to us are old and do it only every 30 seconds. They were telling us we have to wait till those servers upgrade next year.

We went for lunch with Kenny. Talked about projects, bus tracking – he works on the buses tab on the client, gossiped a bit about Sunny. Sunny is a character; the way he speaks can feel at times offensive. But knowing him – it’s just Sunny, – that’s how he speaks; that is nothing personal. 

Then I read some of the bus existing code, gathering questions for Sunny. Sunny was interviewing someone. I couldn’t tell if it was going very good or very bad. Turned out it went very well. 

Then I talked to Sunny about my bus tracking project. Take the GPS coordinates from the queue, updated every 30 seconds, and merge with the slower feeds, so we get more fresh locations on the client. The plan is for the buses to send us pings every 5 seconds, but the team that is working on it says it’ll run only next year. How does it work now? Now, it turns out, it’s the same 30 seconds + refresh within 20 seconds, depending on how lucky it gets. So I’ll get read of those random up to 20 seconds delay for now, and later the queue will be more frequently updated. Okay, seems fair; that is not as much work as tracking the trains underground. 

Then worked on the parsing part. Cursor didn’t work with Kotlin that well, so I switched back to Intellij; CoPilot was too dumb compared to Cursor, so I ended up just coding myself. I went home by 6. Kenny was still in the office; it was unusual. I forgot to ask him how 1:1 with Will went.

At home, we warmed up our moghrabieh, and ate it with salad, drinking tomato juice. B had some good news about their film script with Y. Then I read something light (wars, word affairs, Indian trading sanctioned tech to Russia [another day YouTube was recommending me something from WION, Indian television – the picture they paint there is only comparable to Russian propagandal showing bravado about big bombs, etc]).

Then worked on merging GTFS-rt and CBCT sources. Most of the time spent on the test: I tell it to ignore the estimated time, but it won't. Ended up just removing it from the objects before comparing. AssertJ, this thing is called, compares deep objects; otherwise, pretty nice library.

In the evening we watched "The Sound of Silence" (2019) on MUBI. I think it's full of very subtle and hard-to-trace humor, but most people probably don't get it – the rating is below 6 on IMDB. The guy's invention is to tune the ambient sounds of houses, which he tries to publish as a PhD thesis, but fails – cause he's a musician and not a scientist. The authors imply, that if he wanted to make it a commercial "product", he'd be rich and successful, but the guy hates the word "product," hates commerce, and ends up in depression instead of being rich and happy. Very real story, it seems, if read between the lines. I gave it a seven.

Then played Panzer Corps 2; still trying to understand the war – on the tactical level. I was never curious about it, but now the times are calling for it. The battle of Paris; (my) German Panzers capture Paris and its surroundings. I thought it was easy – I just had to be swift. Somehow, it's not. French tanks are just too powerful, and my artillery seems completely useless. I thought war was dumb, is it now? I should probably read something about the tactics. Somewhere I read recently that what Hitler had done on the western front took a militaristic and diplomatic genius; was it indeed? 

Slept by 2.

Finished a bunch of dumb tasks, but feeling blue for some reason. It must be cause I slept 4 hours on Friday and Saturday – I can recognize this feeling. Nothing matters. But work is even easier that way.

I read some good reviews of PDF Owl – that was encouraging. Interestingly, some students reached out to me about getting a discount or a free license for them since they are students. Well, in fact, I already priced it with students in mind; but now I think about it, people want to have an exclusive discount, while the actual price point is not as important to them. I'd be better off if I priced it double and offered a discount for students and researchers. Then they'd feel good about getting the discount even though paying the same price. That must be some fundamental rule of marketing, but I feel like I rediscovered it at home.

I met with Justin 6-7pm. He's planning to work on his project for 10 hours per week. That is kind of light. We should scale down the project, I guess. He's a high-school student that I'm mentoring this summer. 

It was super windy outside, but the sunset was bright red and charming. I slept by 11.

I stayed home; we had the standup at 9:30. Angela already has Jira access and has started working on a ticket. That is too fast: I got my email working only on the second week. Jira took longer to add me to. Then another stand-up at 10. We have two standups on Mondays, somehow. My plan was: anything from Ryan’s code review, then SMS pumping, and then getting started on the new project. 

The new project is to read a low-latency data feed and bring some better data in our app. What to do with that I’m still not sure. Torrey told me to talk to Sunny about the details. Sunny said we should talk together with Will and Dan W. So I brought everyone together, and then they mostly talked by themselves, and in the second half, I barely understood what they were talking about. A bunch of keywords, and what that means I didn’t know. PA/CIS, ATS, PLC, and the like. I had no idea what it was.

In the evening, at first, I saw something dark moving by my side on the floor and got scared; then I saw a tiny mouse running near the heater. A very small mouse of the length of my little finger. The mouse ran kind of funny: sliding on the corner, as the fat belly dragged it from turning to under the heater, and it moved the limps fast, sliding on the parquet floor. The mouse probably was surprised by seeing me not less than I got scared by her. She looked kind of cute, but for the rest of the evening I had that fear of the dumb mouse just wanting to bite whatever came to it – I was afraid it would bite my toe if it got under my desk.

In the office I found the first strange bug with ReactNative: SelectionList would re-mount my component, so the state would be lost. Not sure if it was a bug or intended behavior, but moving it outside of SelectionList solved the problem.

Then, the spammers were back: this time from French numbers. First, we saw a spike in costs, and I ran my metric and found that there were thousands of tickets bought on French phone numbers in the last couple of days. That explained the spike in auth costs. What could it be? French holiday? Are students heading to some college for the summer term? I kept imagining. Then Sunny showed me that there were only 10 tickets bought and 4 new accounts. I looked again: I was selecting the year of data. Doh! So the spammers were indeed back and from the French numbers. 

In the afternoon Angela stopped by and said hi after her orientation. She’s our last hire. Now, our team is fully assembled.

Woke up at 8, hardly. The train was crowded; I read Kleppmann's book. Somehow, I was excited about reading it for 40 minutes on the train in the morning, but when I actually started reading the chapter about replication I got bored – minds crave something new, but Kleppmann is all about well-structured old.

Chatted with Abhi in the morning about WWDC, tile managers in Linux, and the Vimium plugin for Chrome – it assigns a shortcut to all links on the page, so no need to use the mouse.

Sunny was eager to ban our SMS spammers in the morning; whitelisting "good" countries. I was cautious of banning all not on the list. I ran various queries in BigQuery across last year, then figured the numbers from Haiti are our good customers despite not making it to the "whitelist"; and other similar countries. There is some kind of irony going on here that I can't detect. Whitelist, blacklist, all that colonizer's language. Anyway, in the end, we stayed with the blacklist and banned 90 countries total which I checked are rarely buying our tickets.

Kotlin Notebooks are pretty awesome for data analysis. It loads CSV or JSON, then statically checks types and auto-completes against the detected schema. The only thing – it has some of the most concise documentation I've ever seen. A sentence, and an example; and sentence and another sentence; another sentence on a new line. So I'm looking at it and re-reading, like poetry, and trying to understand what that means for my earthly life.

Then I finished the screens in React Native, working till 7. Going back home late; the train was pretty empty and I kept reading Kleppmann, even though bored with it. We made a super-salad with the dressing of mixing 1/2ts tahini, 1/2ts miso, 1ts lemon juice, 1/2ts mustard, 1/2ts maple syrup, and 3tb olive oil. It was yummy.

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.

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?

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.