Walking up Bernal

Saturdays and Sundays Wendy and I like to walk up and over Bernal, rambling over the peak and through the surrounding neighborhoods. The top of the hill is rich and wild with great views of the city; on clear days you can see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge from a single vantage point.

The area round the edge of the park is threaded with tangled streets, often winding up vertiginous slopes (it's a little-known fact that San Francisco's steepest street section is on Bernal).

It's a constantphotographicinspiration, even after five years of living here.

Wendy and Balloons

Wendy in Bernal sunshine. Taken last week.

Google Replay

Sad but true: in 3½ years at Google I never compiled a protocol buffer. I also never contributed directly to the launch of a consumer product on google.com. Making up for lost time at Twitter, though, in my first few weeks there I've done both.

Enter Google Replay.

Search for Bieber on Google Replay and it'll show you a chart of the volume of Justin Bieber tweets this month. If you wonder what the spike is on April 10th, you can drill down by clicking on the timeline, and then again, to individual tweets about the JB sketch on SNL. Pretty cool! See also: results for Chirp, the Twitter developer conference.

Puzzler: below is a chart showing tweet volume (from Google Replay) for a two-word search term over the last few months. Notice the pattern of weekends (green) and the anomaly (red). Name the search term.

Chirp

Last week I spent a lot of time at Twitter's first ever developer conference, Chirp. What an event!

A handful of my favorite photos (full set here):

• @biz and @ev and @ev and @biz
• @goldman
• @jess
• @kevinweil
• @marissamayer
• Beanbag
• Showcase Crowd
• Coffee Bar

Learning or Earning, Redux

A friend David provided some valuable feedback on my last post. He gives me a great opportunity to take a small step back and clarify some things. He also sets up the perfect segue into my continued thoughts. Read on.

From David:

Though I've learned a lot from my time working at other leading & famous tech companies, I've probably grown and learned more at Google than the other places... from a technical perspective. On the nontechnical side, I've probably learned more elsewhere. But from a tech perspective, it's absolutely totally worthwhile - as well as fun and productive.

I actually agree wholeheartedly, which makes me think I wasn't clear in my intentions last time. I had a great few years working at Google, had fun and learned a whole lot. I wasn't meaning to bash the place or indicate any regret at having been there (I have none). Quite apart from anything else I met a fantastic set of folks there, David himself amongst them.

It's inevitable, though, working at any one company, that there comes a point beyond which you're no longer becoming skilled in the kinds of things the company does and instead you're developing increasing expertise in the way the company does them.

In the beginning you're learning the principles of computing at scale; in the end you're the guy to whom people go when they need help debugging config files for the proprietary distributed software stack. You start off gaining an understanding of best practice for source control management across ten thousand engineers, and end up with a homegrown library of shells scripts which will only ever work for $COMPANY's system.

Having just changed jobs, I'm experiencing an acute sensitivity to transferrable and non-transferrable skills. The key discovery for me is that the general principle applies beyond the domain of software engineering. If you're developing a talent for getting things done organizationally, try to watch out for the point after which day by day you're getting better and better at getting things done in your company in particular rather than getting things done in general.

I had coffee the other day with a friend who estimated that in her job she spends more time going around getting approvals to do stuff than she spends actually doing stuff. She's amongst the very best where she works at getting approvals for things, but to what extent is that skill fungible in the jobs market? How might one expect her to perform in a new organizational context?

Ultimately this is, of course, only interesting to the extent that you care about the "jobs market" or becoming an attractive commodity within that market. To repeat myself: my facile philosophy on my accidental career is "be in a job where you're either earning big or learning big". The point of these posts, though, is that you should also consider what's actually worth learning.

Recent polaroid:

Learning or Earning

Google has a legendary and fearsome proprietary software stack, designed for massive scale. Distributed serving, distributed load balancing, distributed processing, distributed locking, distributed file system, distributed structured storage. Many of the principles are public by now— GFS, Bigtable, Map Reduce, Chubby are some examples—but the Google implementations are most certainly not in the open. Plus there are large horizontal pieces of Google technology which aren't even well-known publicly and about which I can't even write.

It's all enormously clever stuff. Seriously.

And when I joined Google this clever stuff was an impressive competitive advantage. It allowed Google to operate at an unprecedented scale, with huge reliability as well as at lower unit operating cost than competitors. And it still runs like this, and they're still way out front with this technology as far as I can tell.

Over time, though, such an advantage naturally erodes in relative terms. The open source stack grows ever thicker and by now includes pieces of technology like Cassandra, ZooKeeper, HDFS and Pig (and indeed the Hadoop project in general). The principles of huge-scale computing on commodity hardware are being better understood, and the open stack becomes ever-more viable for real-world work.

As the gap between commodity and proprietary narrows, the downsides of a homegrown stack become increasingly palpable. It takes longer to migrate acquired companies to your platform. There's no liquid talent market into which to tap when hiring. Maintaining a custom toolchain becomes burdensome. You risk making your engineers feel like outsiders in the broader tech community—ironically despite the hyper-advanced technology with which they work. Your existing employees may even resist or resent developing skills which aren't marketable elsewhere.

This last point is key. For a long time my facile philosophy on my accidental career was "be in a job where you're either earning big or learning big". Lately, though, I've begun to think a little deeper about the trade-off. It's important not just that one is learning but also what one is learning. On the technical side the argument is clear, I hope (see above). It's recently occurred to me that there's an argument directly parallel from an organizational perspective.

That's for next time.

Here's a polaroid from my commute to Twitter yesterday:

While you wait

I've got two blog posts in draft form waiting to be finished. They're both hard work but I'm glad I'm taking the time.

While you wait, here are a few recent polaroids. From the Twitter office:

From April and Brad's patio:

From my commute today:

Mission and Vision, bis

Apropos of last time, on xpastor.org there's a really great framework for thinking about organizational mechanics and purpose. I know nothing about xpastor but I thought that the neat entity diagram was great and the quote from Sun Tzu solid.

Last night I posted photos of guests from April's wedding. Here's one of my favorites:

Mission and Vision

I wrote the below a while back as part of building a framework of common purpose in my group at work. At my new job I've found the same thing useful to contextualize the business and the decisions we're making. It helps to have a logically consistent line of thought all the way from the big picture to the quotidian.

A Mission is what an organization is all about; what we do every day, and what we excel at. Think of it as answering the questions "what do we do, for whom, and why?". It defines our role at the highest level and describes the areas which are pre-ordained for us.

A Vision, on the other hand, describes what the future will look like when we achieve our Mission. It's what will happen because we execute so superbly on our Mission. "A PC on every desk", Microsoft's early vision statement, is archetypal.

Traditionally, one's Mission would be derived from one's Vision. Once you've decided what you want the future to look like (the Vision), you pick the Mission which will get you there.

Putting this all in perspective,

• Vision dictates Mission
• ...which determines Strategy
• ...which surfaces Goals
• ...that frame Objectives
• ...which in turn drive the Tactics
• ...to deliver Key Results

Here's a picture from my commute the other day:

Austin Wedding

A couple of weekends ago Wendy and I flew to Austin to see April and Brad get married. I've posted a set of the wedding on Flickr as well as one of some of Austin we saw.

I'd never been to Austin before but liked the feel of the place. I used to live in Colorado, and Austin had the air of a cross between downtown Boulder and Denver's LoDo. College town, hip crowd, sprawling frontier settlement, ancient creek, huge skies, wide concrete roads, prairie homes, converted brick warehouses, blue city in a red state.

Look at that big sky, clear as can be:

Wendy enjoying a chopped beef sandwich, authentic Texas BBQ style:

A rural suburban front yard, 2 miles from the Texas Capitol Building:

From the wedding, a few favorites are this one of the bride and groom:

and this one of the gorgeous occasion:

Reinventing Collapse

For Christmas, one of the books I got was Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov. The premise is that the author was "born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in the mid seventies". He was "an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late eighties and mid-nineties". From the platform of this experience he compares the former Soviet Union and today's United States. Noting similarities and differences between the two—in culture, infrastructure, religion, economy, industry, government, education, housing, and so on—he extrapolates a narrative of the impending collapse of the US via some thoughtful analogies with the fall of the SU.

Dmitry is brilliantly perceptive and wonderfully witty, and Reinventing Collapse is a wickedly cynical book. I had many favorite passages but here's one in particular which I enjoyed:

The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power. The US has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable and which together hold a monopoly on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organizes itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike. It is certainly more sporting to have two capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one communist party to vote for. The things they fight over in public are generally symbolic little tokens of social policy, chosen for ease of public posturing. The Communist party offered just one bitter pill. The two capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party pre-purchases exactly 50 percent of the vote through largely symmetrical allocation of campaign resources and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat. It is a tribute to the intelligence of the American people that so few of them bother to vote.

On a very few occasions the hyperbole was just too much and the propositions arising became farcical or facile. The vast majority of Dmitry's "intentionally provocative thought experiments", though, were fascinating, wise, cogent, intelligent, and delivered with a delightfully dark sense of humor.

Reinventing Collapse is an enjoyable and worthwhile read; I couldn't put it down once I'd started. As one reviewer comments inside the front cover: "be prepared to have your window shoved open and feel the fresh air shake you up".

Two Truths and a Lie

To recap from last time, two truths and a lie about me:

1. I went to ballet class as a kid;
2. I played the piccolo in the school orchestra; and
3. I was a competitive teenage ping-pong player.

Illustrative of the need for the Salmon protocol, I've had friends guessing the lie on Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Twitter, and in the comments here on my blog. I was surprised to find the votes easily consolidated:

• nobody chose number 1, the ballet classes;
• one person chose number 2, the piccolo; and
• everybody else chose number 3, the ping-pong.

Congratulations, then, to my friend Craig for being the only one to pick out my lie about the piccolo. In actual fact I played the flute in the school orchestra. I've been told that's a bit sneaky, but hey—this is the internet. It's the wild west here, folks.

I'm not sure what to make of nobody picking the ballet classes.

Here's the other photo of me which nearly made the cut to be my "Hi, I'm Isaac" photo to accompany my fun facts. Taken by Wendy in Golden Gate Park last summer:

Fun Facts

I'd never come across the concept of "fun facts" before working in Silicon Valley. Here, though, they seem to be the standard way of introducing people. Mainly they come in triples, for example "Everybody, meet Bob. Bob climbed Mount Tahoma last year. Before that he lived for ten years in a shack in North Dakota. He knits his own swimwear".

My last two employers have asked me for fun facts about myself so that they could introduce me, and here comes my new employer asking for the same (I start there on Monday).

So while I think about it here are three fun facts about me:

1. I first made money from computers when I was 13, earning £10 for a 6502 assembly language program published in Acorn User magazine in the UK;
2. my wife Wendy and I are expecting our first child in July and are very excited; and
3. I'm too old for a fixie but I ride one anyway.

Twitter also asked me to supply a photo of myself. I sent this one which Wendy took on Spring Break last year in Lone Pine, CA:

Talking to Wendy this evening about fun facts, she introduced me to a variant "two truths and a lie" which I like much better. For completeness, here are two truths and a lie about me:

1. I went to ballet class as a kid;
2. I played the piccolo in the school orchestra; and
3. I was a competitive teenage ping-pong player.

Spot the lie.

Bike vs Tomatoes

Following on from my last post, this is what the aftermath of a night of wholesale vegetable trading in Borough Market used to look like. I took this from the window of my flat in 1998.

Three Windows

Years ago I lived in Borough Market. When I moved there in 1998 it was pretty much an abandoned area of London frozen in time: a little Dickensian enclave. Filthy vegetables were sold wholesale 2am–6am, the corner pub opened 6am–9am to serve the market vendors, but for the other 17 hours each day it was more or less empty apart from shady characters up to no good amongst the deserted stalls and sooty arches.

I took the photo below exactly ten years ago today, 23 February 2000. See those three windows on the first row, the second set in from the left? Those looked out from the front of my flat, 11 Stoney Street:

Here are the same three windows a year or so later, in June 2001. I can't remember what was going on at the time with the flat upstairs but boarded-up windows were pretty common in the area.

And talking of shady characters, you can see the three windows again top-center about a minute into the first scene of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Here's Bacon on the run after the cozzers turn up:

(The B.J.D. SUPPLIES LTD sign was put up for the filming in 1998 and taken down afterwards)

The whole neighborhood has changed quite a bit now; I visited a couple of weeks ago as I passed through London. These days it's glistening sun-dried tomatoes rather than muddy sprouts, and instead of piles of trash on the corner it's carts offering slivers of imported jamón or nuggets of organic falafel. It's upscale and lavish and epicurean and gastronomic. How incredible that an institution 150 years old (or 700 at a stretch) can transform so dramatically and so suddenly.

The three windows are still there. The windowless ground floor, however, which used to house my downstairs neighbor (a reclusive artist) in the late 90s, is now a glass-fronted oyster place.

For the nostalgic, I've got on Flickr a set of shots of Borough Market in its pre-tapas days.

Fifteen Minutes

My moment of fame: isaach.com being linked from TechCrunch. You can't but sympathize with the fourth commenter George:

Are you seriously planning on reporting about every little nobody that leaves Google and joins Twitter?

Indeed.

Here's what a Crunching looks like, showing visitors to this site over time:

Next Stop: Twitter

When I left Google I didn't have any plans in particular apart from taking a "funemployment" break and finding the right next move. At first I wondered how I was going to go about it.

Ever the good corporate citizen, I figured I'd start off with meetings. I met a lot of people in a lot of coffee shops. There were some who got in contact with me when they heard I'd left Google. There were other people from previous lives and previous companies with whom I was long overdue in catching up. Still other interesting people I managed to hunt down through ruthless LinkedIn-ing.

I had a great time hanging out with people and talking about the business of technology. I signed some NDAs and learned some amazing things. It's actually incredibly exciting how much is going on out there.

After doing a lot of talking and a lot of thinking I made the breakthrough realization that in fact I wasn't looking for a specific role so much as I was looking for a specific environment:

• a tech company;
• a transformative product;
• a kick-ass team;
• a strong top-down vision; and
• ideally in San Francisco.

and then it got much easier to narrow down the possibilities. So while I did consider a few especially interesting opportunities outside of SF I mostly stayed local.

From the beginning, Twitter stood out as seriously impressive. Everyone I met there was smart, super-interesting, switched on, and welcoming. I'm a keen user and fan of the product. What's more one of the co-founders mentioned while interviewing me that he wants Twitter to be not just in San Francisco but a part of San Francisco. I love this city and thought that that sentiment was especially cool.

Most of all, though, and as I said on Twitter itself, how could I resist such charming stationery?

I'll start next month as a Product Manager and I'm pretty excited. Between now and then I've got a few weeks of funemployment left and lots of thinking to do so I can hit the ground running in my new job. If you've got thoughts or ideas about Twitter, send 'em over.

More Polaroids

Like I said, I'm a bit obsessed with this iPhone app. Here are a few more shots since last time.

I staged and took this one to make Wendy's birthday card:

This one taken at an open house down the road which Wendy and I went to view:

This one round the corner from us in the evening sun:

This one of the Contemporary Jewish Museum downtown:

This one just up 24th Street from us:

I just can't help myself!

Polaroids

The other day I bought an iPhone app which takes photos in the style of a Polaroid® camera. It's wickedly addictive. I may be a little obsessed with it.

Some recent shots include this plant in Facebook's lobby:

this of the outside of Wendy's school:

this of city skies:

this outside Blue Bottle Café downtown:

another outside Wendy's school:

and this of Wendy herself:

An ever-growing set including these and more is on Flickr. I know it's corny but boy this thing is so much fun.

Not always right, and sometimes wrong

I've been reading notalwaysright.com recently. It's a compendium of transcriptions of often hilarious exchanges between serving staff and customers.

Recently there was Famous Ignoramus:

BOOKSTORE | HOBART, AUSTRALIA

Me: “Hello, sir, how may I help you?”
Customer: “Do you have those books in that series?”
Me: “Which series is that?”
Customer: “You know, the one by that famous author.”
Me: “There are lots of famous authors, sir. Do you know what one of the books was called?
Customer: “I want the third book in the series by that famous author!”
Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but without more information, I don’t know which book you’re after.”
Customer: “This is ridiculous! How could you not know the ones I’m talking about? They’re FAMOUS!”

It reminded me of my own stint working in a bookshop in 1992 when I had a number of almost identical experiences. Going beyond the above basic encounter, my two favorite stories from that time:

• the guy who called up asking for "3 feet of black books". He's decorating his house, has just put shelves up, and now needs to fill 36 inches of this shelving with dark-spined works of literature. We sold him a bunch of remaindered paperbacks.
• the guy in the raincoat who spent a while with his back to us in the Sports section. My colleague Glynn eventually approached him with a friendly "can I help you?"... but regretted it when he saw that the guy was masturbating over a gymnastics book.

In other news, I took a bunch of photos with my new lens the other night. Here's one, the rest here

Farewell Google

My boss was fantastically gracious. She said "I'm proud of you. I'll miss you. Thanks for helping me build the team". You could barely ask for more when you hand in your resignation.

A week or so later I sent out this email:

and received in return a wealth of warm wishes from people with whom I've worked. Man alive, I've worked with some really super people at Google.

This evening I had my team over for dinner. What a great team! They gave me this lovely card:

Fitting and inspirational. I'll miss them.

Tomorrow's my last full day at Google and next week I begin my "funemployment" with a quick trip to the UK. Exciting times! As a present to myself I bought a new lens for my camera. I took this picture of Wendy with it:

It's true that I don't yet have any "next thing" lined up. If you have any ideas, let me know. My résumé is at isaach.com/cv.

Gimlets all round

This week: the size of a lime.

Crunchies

I went to the Crunchies last Friday night. The Crunchies as far as I can tell aspire to be the tech equivalent of the Academy (film), Emmy (TV), Grammy (music) or Tony (stage) Awards.

Tech celebrities appear at the Crunchies annually—including plenty flying in from around the world—and just as with the more famous ceremonies you might be forgiven for thinking that the real talent is probably elsewhere. On the other hand, unlike the more prestigious SoCal-baed awards, they let the fawning masses like me in too... if you're quick enough when they put the tickets on sale, that is.

I was in the cheapseats for the awards ceremony, but surprisingly enough two down from a guy who won a free Nexus One (winning tickets were taped to the undersides of selected seats). It was a good time, with geeky entertainment from the Richter Scales.

My friend April joined me for the afterparty and we rubbed shoulders with the tech elite... sort of. And then we had our photo taken:

Fruit and Veg

When you're having a baby you can barely help doing internet research on what's going on during pregnancy. Turns out, to my surprise, that it's all about fruit and vegetables. Week 7: it's as big as a blueberry. Week 9: as big as a grape. Week 13: as big as a peach. A friend of mine recalls the "Spanish onion" stage, which is remarkably specific.

It's always foodstuffs but apparently never "as big as a packet of chips" or "as big as a cheeseburger". Fruit and vegetables only.

Or so I thought.

And then I found this delightful "Dad's pregnancy guide". Week 7: as big as the power button on a TV remote. Week 10: the size of the head of a hammer. Week 13: a gas cap, of all things.

Love it!

Here's a picture of Wendy the day we got our exciting news: