2015

Time to reflect.

2015 abridged

I started this year celebrating a very cloudy New Year’s Eve home with my parents. That was vacation for me: I took a few weeks off my internship at Google Paris to fly back home for the holidays. I was very happy to be back for a few weeks - it was lonely in Paris.

When the time to return to work came, my thoughts were “oh well, we signed up for this, let’s just get this over with” and I counted weeks. The project I worked on was probably the most interesting thing I did so far, but I was pretty bad at making friends outside work: I’m shy and didn’t learn nearly enough French to socialize with random French. (I decided that’s a mistake I never want to make again in my life.) I read books, worked on my bachelor’s thesis and I played the old Starcraft. (I still didn’t quite manage to finish the Zerg campaign in Brood War - man, games used to be really hard…) I met a lot of interesting people at Google. My supervisor and team leader, Rich, was great, and today he is the exact image I have in my head when I hear “senior software engineer” - a highly experienced and competent leader by example with an impressive knowledge of the wider context of the project. From my team, I most fondly remember chatting with Clement, Julien, Aurélien, Wiktor, Amaury, Philo, Nohemi and James. In dilligent code reviews, Mathias taught me how little I know about C++ and what it means to be deeply ashamed of your code :)

My manager at Google kindly let me explore Google’s offices in Bay Area for a week at the company’s expense. That was one of the final weeks of my internship. I flew with Aurélien, the PM on my team. I stayed in San Francisco near Civic Centre. I spent two days shadowing Aurélien on meetings with our allied teams at YouTube’s HQ in San Bruno, two days hanging out with the research side of my team at the Googleplex in Mountain View and a day just walking around SF.

After I returned home, I moved to Prague again. I rented a random free spot at the Charles uni dorm with a random guy. We didn’t have much in common or talk much, but he wasn’t the worst roommate I ever had. I spent most of my days working on my bachelor’s thesis next to my advisor, MJ, at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics. It was fun and I learned a lot of interesting things about data structures. I was elated not only because I managed to finish the thesis at all, but also because both MJ and my opponent were impressed by the quality.

Between March and July, I intentionally didn’t take any work on the side. I attended some lectures, but mostly for the fun of it. I went to a lot of Charlie (my uni’s LGBT club) meetups. This part of the year was very relaxing. At one point (after I finished my thesis and my bachelor’s exam), I actually finished my near-time TODO list, which was an amazing feeling. My only worry was not to get arrested before my summer internship.

I also studied a lot for my bachelor’s final exam, mostly with Petr Hudeček, Verča Slívová and Filip Šedivý. We spent several days just procrastinating in the park over 5 kilos of paper, mocking our own imminent death at the exam, and it was glorious. Once D-day came, we finished with straight A’s. The exam was soooo eaaasyyy!

I spent the summer in San Francisco working at Dropbox on the iOS team. I had a good time with a lot of great people. Among interns, there was Ian, Gellert the crazy Hungarian, Karel (whom I knew a little bit from before), of course Marin and the other Croatians. Zrinka, who understood me the most. The Eastern-European gang. Tianlin. Brian. The Americans. Others. Dropbox is full of inspiring heroes. Yufei. Michael. Rich the Chanimal. Haoyi, the patron saint of Scala. Jukka. James. Jack. And lots of heroes I didn’t get to know nearly as well as I’d like to. There was also a ton of fun events: rafting, cycling, and everything else we thought of.

Work was interesting, but I think working on iOS was not a very good fit for me. I mostly did a data-science kind of thing, and I felt some tension between what I worked on and what was important for the company to do. I’m also kind of a perfectionist, and that clashed with the need to get things moving fast. I’m glad I know today that perfectionism can be a flaw, and not in the humblebrag sense. And computer science is about humans.

On the Google and Dropbox internships, I wanted to figure out a few important questions. First, do I like working more than studying? Would I want to study for a PhD? Second, if I decide to start working, do I want to stay home in Czech Republic? Would I want to live in Silicon Valley?

I like both work and studying new things. I would like to study more and to get a PhD, but I don’t think I have enough commitment for it and it carries a high opportunity cost. Regarding home/abroad: I want both.

I didn’t get many new answers. Even worse, I gained a much bigger sense of urgency.

In San Francisco, I also interviewed at a few companies, which was a learning, if exhausting experience. I discovered not only my unknown strengths, but also my unknown weaknesses. For example, I sometimes come off as arrogant and dismissive. By the way, if you’re looking for a job at a startup, you should totally try Triplebyte.

I have been continuing my sluggish ascent towards financial independence, and thanks to very competitive compensation in Silicon Valley (and, to a lesser extent, in Paris), I crossed several financial milestones this year. In my current conservative model, I’m at most 7 years of software engineering away from financial independence. It’s a very comfortable feeling to know it would take several major mishaps for me to get in financial trouble today. I also feel much less guilty with spending money when it makes sense; after all, it’s just money.

I came back in October. I enrolled in a ton of subjects, but slightly fewer than was usual in my first and second year. If I execute this right, I should be done with all I need for my degree (aside from the thesis and final exam) by the end of February.

For better or worse, over this year, I became acutely aware of the limited duration of my life and of the need to take action to use it well.

I decided to contribute to KSP a bit more once again. (That’s a thing my uni does for high-schoolers interested in CS.) In December, we had a nice weekend retreat with lectures to be had for everyone interested. It was a great success: my voice box was sore for days. I’m trying to get us organizers to hang out a bit more: it’s kind of stupid that all these great people mostly argue through the medium of the mailing list.

I took a little bit of work on the side. I’m hacking for Factorify, which is a very small and early company working on smart enterprise systems for factories. So far, my work was interesting (I’m applying my knowledge of planning and scheduling and I’m finally trying Java in prod), but realities of enterprise work are somewhat disappointing. Luckily, I work whenever I want and as much or little as I want, which is unusually nice.

I started playing DnD with a few folks from my school. It’s something I wanted to try for many years, but I never did, probably due to a mix of not knowing other players and due to the air of hard-core nerdiness around it. Turns out it’s pretty fun, and there’s no reason to care about what anyone thinks about nerdiness.

Speaking about guilty pleasures, I also installed Windows the first time in several years (borking my hard drive twice in the process…) and bought about as many games as I bought in the preceding 10 years.

I gradually learned about transhumanism. It’s not just a bunch of sci-fi-crazy fat people who want to be really smart robots. It’s a bunch of sci-fi-crazy people who believe we can enhance the human condition, as we already have before. I haven’t yet internalized all the related ideas (especially cryonics, and I’m not quite convinced we will have strong AI in our lifetimes), but even without all the crazy ideas, there is a simple core truth: We are in control of our actions. Through our actions, we can change the universe to our preference.

Books I read in 2015

• The first two books of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. I highly recommend both.
• Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. My brother gave me a copy of this book for my birthday about 7 +- 2 years ago when I was an unappreciative youth full of myself. Unfortunately, it sat on my shelves collecting dust until 2015.
• Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. My friend Jarda Bican recommended this one to me after I enjoyed Steppenwolf.
• Snow Crash and Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
• The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. I liked his book Accelerando, which is a collection of tales before, during and after the Singularity. Atrocity Archives, his earlier piece, is a slightly different genre: it’s about summoning Cthulhu’s minions by running a weird program. It’s a “haha-funny” kind of sci-fi with a lot of running around and shooting death rays. It’s entertaining, but I liked it less than other “deep sci-fi” books - I mostly got tired of all the action followed by more action.
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It’s pretty good light reading about today’s world gone slightly worse than it is. Adventure, fighting the Big Bad Man, and hacking current tech for good and bad. I also read Homeland, but I didn’t find it nearly as good.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, independently recommended to me by Petr Hudeček and Ondra Vadinský. This is the most epic fan-fiction I ever read. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a researcher working on artificial intelligence and rationality and he runs a rationalist community called LessWrong (look out, it’s a really deep rabbit-hole). HPMOR retells the story of Harry Potter in a universe where Harry is a child prodigy of science.
• Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences by Andrei Sorin. I highly recommend this book. The subject is the relationship between complex systems, like the human mind or the real world, and their models in software. I don’t agree with the author on all the details (e.g., eschewing higher-level database languages), but he has a very valid point: you can’t fit the world in a box. If you try to shape everything according to your favorite paradigm (like OOP), either you will have to weaken your paradigm so much it will lose its original purpose, or your model of the world under this paradigm will be practically useless. The craft of good software is not about models pretending to be universal (UML, structured programming or relational databases): to make good software, you must simply develop skills through years of practice, and these skills cannot be reduced to a simple description. Unfortunately, the book is about twice as thrice as long as it needs to be, due to long exposition and lots of detailed examples.
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein. About two years ago, reading her book The Shock Doctrine highly influenced my political ideas - most importantly, my belief that our current system protects the interests of the wealthy a tad too much and that we should apply more global optimization. I wanted to understand humanity’s impact on the environment a bit better and I hoped to hear some arguments of the environmentalist side from this book. I learned some depressing things about Big Oil and other actors profiting from climate change and about the interesting times we can expect if we stay on our current course for another 50 years. However, the author rambled in ~the last third about how we can save our Mother Earth through the power of spiritual healing, which was disappointing.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Be interested. Appreciate people. Don’t use people as instruments, instead align your wants with their wants. Be friendly and sympathetic. People usually rate it very high, but I didn’t find many new things in there.

Some music I found in 2015

• Arvo Pärt is the first composer of classical music I now listen to regularly. Listen to this.
• Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men
• Counting Stars reminds me of how I felt at Google. Striving to be better and boldly facing challenges. Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.
• Katy Perry. I expected her to be just another shitty pop-artist for me to ignore, but turns out her tunes are pretty catchy. (Yeah, I know, 2014 called or whatever.)
• Lights Out Asia is good music for programming.

Thanks to Víťa Slíva, who shares a similar taste in music with me but spends much more time procrastinating over music, I had a neverending supply of hipster artists to explore.

• Pinback and Built to Spill. Fortress is really good, as is Off by 50.
• Cymbals Eat Guitars. Listen to Warning or And the Hazy Sea.
• The Drift (kind of hard to Google). Maybe Gardening, Not Architecture?
• To Die in LA by Lower Dens

Other stuff

• Rick and Morty is a glorious show, especially when high; it also has an unusual rewatch value. I think S02E02 Mortynight Run is the best. “The worlds can be one together, cosmos without hatred…”
• South Park season 19 was pretty good. I laughed out loud while watching The City Part of Town from our intern apartment just south of China Basin - SoDoSoPa really hit home.
• I learned a bunch about software they don’t teach in schools, especially “soft stuff” like releases, dependencies, code quality, building big systems. I became competent in Python and Go.
• I pruned down the complexity of my “personal infrastructure”. My mail is now Google Inbox and my calendar is Google Calendar.
• Silicon Valley is a crazy and great place.
• The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant