yasha mostofi

Montana 2020

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Montana - 2020

Glacier National Park

Pit stop in PDX - mandatory Voodoo and Deadstock. Our AirBnB was situated in a mini forest, with plenty of trees for hammocking, and a calming lake in our yard.

We had one smaller hike at Strawberry Lake, and two larger hikes at Glacier.

No trip is complete without the right bag, or proper mid-hike snack.

Japan 2019

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Japan - 2019

Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Mt. Fuji

For my first trip (hopefully of many) to Japan, I spent roughly two weeks traveling between Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Mt. Fuji. This photo set is a "summary" of the trip - I took roughly 3,000 photos with my camera and 1,500 photos with my phone.

My trip started in Tokyo, where we visited the famous Shibuya crossing and the Palace and its gorgeous gardens. We also visited a festival at a nearby temple and the fish market, all while enjoying some very tasty (and pricy) street food wagyu.

After four days in Tokyo, we spent a short weekend in a town close to Mt. Fuji. We traveled only via train the whole trip, and got to ride in a Thomas the Tank Engine train to our final station by Lake Kawaguchiko. The town was very quiet and peaceful, and we got to visit a mini tourist-friendly village showing off different arts and crafts.

Our next destination was Kyoto, probably my favorite part of the whole trip. Kyoto has had a recent rise of third-wave coffee shops, and I tried to weave coffee pit-stops throughout our time there. Besides the coffee, we had some great Japanese food, visited temples both small and large, and hung out on our hostel's rooftop.

One of our mini-trips was to visit Nara, which is famous for ... being able to "mingle" with monkeys and deer. It's a bit of a trek up to the mountain, but the views combined with being able to feed monkeys makes it worthwhile.

Iran 2018

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Photo Stories

Inspired by Paul Stamatiou, I've decided to start posting photos on my website. For the first post, I've picked out about 20 pictures from my trip to Iran this past winter.

Our journey started by attempting to fit 16 bags in the taxi's mini-van. We flew from O'Hare to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Tehran. Even though I always sit aisle, I got to take some window sunset pictures since we had the whole row to ourselves.

First things first: checking out rugs and getting breakfast. We bought bread every other day, and treated ourselves to haleem the first morning.

We also always try to visit tourist hotspots while we're there - so this time we visited Isfahan and the famous Si-o-se-pol (even though the river was dried out) and spent two days in Yazd, which is now a world heritage site.

In Yazd, we checked out the historical wind towerws, designed to cool the large water tanks that sat directly underground in little villages. We also got to visit the Tower of Silence, which is where Zoroastrians would take dead bodies to be eaten by vulters. They had a tower for men and one for women, and we got to climb to the top and peer inside.

Right before we left Yazd, we visited the desert and got to ride some camels. The man who took care of them makes ~$100 USD a month, has three kids (with one currently in the hospital), and drives them one hour each way to school.

the great app purge

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 13:14:08 +0000

So, I’m getting an iPhone X.

Before I switch phones, I wanted to make sure that the backup of my iPhone 6S Plus was good to go. Historically, when I’ve upgraded, I just start from scratch - the purity of a new phone is wonderful. This time around, however, I’m not jailbroken - which means a fresh start isn’t as critical as it was in the past. Wanting to use my backup meant that I had to clean it up and make sure that I actually use all ~50 GB’s of stuff (and 242 apps).

First to go? Apps I don’t use. I have app auto-update off, so I can get a chance to read the release notes. About two months ago, I decided to stop updated apps I don’t use, as a way to keep track of what apps I need to delete. In this post, I’ll be going through the list of apps, and trying to explain why I even have them in the first place, and why I stopped using them. I’ll be a fun experiment!

Airbnb

Over the summer, we tried to plan a trip to Lake Tahoe, and I used the Airbnb app to look for places to stay. We didn’t end up going, and I don’t travel that much by myself, so … goodbye.

Medium

I actually have no idea why I have this downloaded. I can’t remember the last time I opened the app. I usually just read Medium articles in Safari or Pocket.

Acorns

This sounded cool, but then I realized I had to open a new brokerage account, and I had to connect it to my credit cards, and I was too lazy to do all that and do research to see if they are trustworthy enough for my data. Plus, I like managing my own investments.

Motion Stills

I think someone tweeted about this, so I downloaded it. I don’t take Live photos though, so… bye.

GroupMe

I think I used this when I visited a college’s admitted student day with some friends, and that’s about it. Haven’t opened it in a long time.

Strava

Apple Watch.

Beacon

I think I downloaded this when I went to San Jose for AltConf since people were tweeting about it, but then I didn’t use it.

Newegg Mobile

No idea why I have this app.

Periscope

I think I downloaded this when it came out, and haven’t really used it.

CNN

This just sends me notifications about stuff I already see on Twitter. I also prefer to visit their site on Safari.

Vimeo

Not sure why I downloaded this - probably to watch a particular video? Anyways, Vimeo works in Safari.

Postmates

I downloaded this to use when I was in San Francisco, and got some fantastic (and spicy) chicken biryani. No Postmates in Champaign,.

Zillow

I downloaded this to see the value of one really cool house in the Mission in San Francisco. I’ll download it later if I need it.

Dribbble

I downloaded this because one of Stripe’s designers tweeted about the App Store screenshot featuring a Stripe design when it came out. Never opened or used.

Evernote

I actually used to use this all throughout high school, but then they made it so that the free plan only gets two devices, and I have three. Surprised I hadn’t deleted it already.

On second thought, Evernote has some crucial notes from a while ago, so I might keep it…

Sleep Cycle alarm clock

I used to use this back when I had a second iPhone - it would just be used as my alarm clock. (The second iPhone was extremely damaged so I couldn’t really use it, and the alarm clock was pretty cool and I liked seeing the sleep analysis data, don’t judge.)

VSCO

A lot of people use it and I thought it would be Instagram-y, but I just never really figured out how to use it to just consume rather than produce.

Bloomberg

See CNN.

PayByPhone Parking

I think I wanted this to pay for a parking spot once but didn’t actually use it since we found quarters.

Blackboard

I downloaded this to use with the classroom tool, Blackboard, but the app doesn’t really work, so…

UberEATS

See Postmates, except no chicken biryani.

QR Reader for iPhone

I used this to develop effective goggles for HackIllinois last year, but iOS 11 has a built-in QR scanner now.

Wealthfront

I opened an account, but then realized I’d rather manage my investments.

The Washington Post

See CNN. But I might keep it.

Grubhub

See UberEATS.

Scottrade Mobile

I used to have my brokerage account in Scottrade, but didn’t really like the UI. As such my Scottrade account is no more.

The Wall Street Journal

See CNN.

Runkeeper

See Strava.

dub dub

Sat, 29 Jul 2017 20:00:08 +0000

Last summer, I was working in Champaign, IL, and one of my goals for 2017 was to work in the Bay Area. Compared to Champaign, the Bay Area has a lot more events that I’m interested in attending. At the top of my list? WWDC. I’ve wanted to go for a few years now, and this summer, I ended up in San Francisco - which is where WWDC has been located for the past 15 years.

hopes and dreams

Not this year. I signed my offer to be in SF in November 2016, and this past Spring, when Apple announced the WWDC dates, they also said it would be located in San Jose, not San Francisco. I already wasn’t planning on attending the actual conference - I would have to take a full week off work, and tickets are $1600, assuming the lottery ended favorably. I just wanted to be there at the same time - to experience the vibe, meet a lot of people I’ve heard about and follow on Twitter, and most importantly, go to Blue Bottle in the morning just to see the crazy WWDC lines everyone always complains about. Fortunately, San Jose is a short (1-1.5 hours) CalTrain ride away, so I started looking at my options. There’s AltConf, which is like a free co-conference that’s been organized for the past few years. AltConf books a nearby venue and streams the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union, along with having additional panels and talks. I got my ticket for that, and also saw that ATP was hosting a live recording. I had listened to their show a few times, and tickets were only $5, so I decided I’d spend Monday evening in San Jose for that. The night before Keynote Day, I actually decided to just spend the whole day in San Jose, since I could watch the Keynote there, and get to experience WWDC as if I was almost there. The last thing I had to go to was John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live. I read Daring Fireball all the time, and listen to his podcast as well. I really wanted to see his Live show because two years ago he had Phil Schiller as a guest, and last year he had both Schiller and Craig Federighi, which means this year had to be as good (or better). His show was on Tuesday of WWDC week, and his tickets went on sale the Thursday before. He tweeted about it Wednesday night, and I was ready to buy right at 9 AM on Thursday when they went on sale. I ended up getting a ticket, and found out that they sold out really quickly:

I was going! Even though this wasn’t the ideal WWDC experience, it was going to be an experience nonetheless.

keynote day morning

I took an absurdly early CalTrain down to San Jose (like 6 AM or something) because I knew that the Keynote started at 10, and I wanted to make sure I knew where I was going and wanted to get a good spot. When I arrived, I saw a ton of WWDC stuff - the lamp posts on streets had banners hanging, and I got really excited. I was basically at WWDC.

After taking the VTA to the actual convention center (there’s a stop right in front of it), I saw the massive line of people outside, with more banners on the convention center. They had speakers set up, playing some awesome music. At about 8 AM, I looked at my email from AltConf to see where I had to go and noticed that the hotel they had booked, was literally connected to the convention center. I had to take the long way to get to the hotel, as San Jose Police had set up road blocks around the actual line and were checking for official badges (which I didn’t have) to let people in, so I poked around in the hotel and figured out where we were supposed to line up. This is what I saw when I went in line.

I was literally watching the WWDC line, the one I see at least 50 tweets of every year. As the line for ALtConf grew, I people-watched both the WWDC and AltConf attendees. First, not having an Apple Watch or AirPods put you in the minority (fortunately I at least had AirPods), and second, the WWDC jackets looked awesome. At about 9, the AltConf organizers let us inside, and had gotten us breakfast burritos, which was awesome. Everyone filed inside the large ballroom, anxiously waiting for the Keynote to begin. Volunteers started bringing around flat whites, as they had hired a barista who had set up a little booth outside the main ballroom.

keynote mini-review

It was awesome. And it went by really quickly. ARKit is cool.

food

I had like four or five hours before ATP Live, so I decided to do some work in the hotel lobby (and charge my phone). After about an hour, I wanted to eat, so I turned to Yelp. I was simultaneously looking for food and good coffee, and discovered that Social Policy was pretty high on the coffee list, and also in the “top 20” for food. It was a short walk away, so I decided to check it out.

(breaking chronological order) When I was listening to ATP’s post-WWDC episode, I realized that apparently Social Policy was the place to go when there wasn’t something big going on. Marco Arment said he was there a ton WWDC week (he didn’t have a ticket), and it makes me really satisfied with my Yelp-o-meter skills.

After grabbing a quick meal, I decided to head back to the hotel and see what was going on, and to get some more work done.

I probably should have stayed at Social Policy longer.

There was already a line for ATP live, and I decided to get in line to make sure I have a good seat. I caught up on Twitter, read some articles about the iMac Pro, skimmed over what was said in the Platforms State of the Union, and before I knew it, we headed inside for the show.

atp

I should have bought one of the ATP shirts when they were available. Pretty much everyone was wearing some sort of ATP shirt.

The show was really funny, and I really liked it.

Everyone sang the theme song at the end, and since I had only really listened to a handful of episodes, I was just awkwardly sitting there trying to pretend like I knew the lyrics.

After the show ended, I headed back to the CalTrain station after getting some pastries for “dinner”.

the talk show

The next day, I took the 4 pm train down to San Jose, thinking that arriving an hour early would be plenty of time to get food and wait in line, since doors weren’t till 6, and the show wasn’t supposed to start until 7. However, as soon as I got to San Jose, someone tweeted a picture of how long the line was. I immediately lost my appetite, and got to the California Theatre as fast as I could. There was a really long line when I got there, but I decided to ask someone what the line was for, and it was for a Swift Panel with Chris Lattner (unfortunately it conflicted). I walked around the block (the wrong way) and found the Talk Show line, which was also quite long. I met some cool people and chatted about the Keynote, and tried to predict Gruber’s guests this year. There were a lot of WWDC attendees in line, with their awesome badges, jackets, and pins, and a strong presence of Apple employees as well, chatting about their week. I was super excited for the show. I was able to get a pretty good seat, in dead center-ish of the Theatre.

After it wrapped up, I headed to a nearby cafe for a quick chai and almond croissant before catching the train. They had live music too, which was awesome. I realized that I was about to miss the train, and if I missed it, I would have to take a car up, and that would be much more expensive, so I hurried over to the station as quickly as possible to make sure I didn’t miss it.

retro

I bought an Apple Watch, series 2, 42mm, Space Gray.

I’m also definitely going to try to “attend” WWDC next year, where “attend” can either be going with a ticket with my name on it, or just being in the area and going to related events.

I also am really close to buying a new iPad Pro.

Summer Sixteen

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 21:52:00 +0000

This summer,

I’m staying in the Champaign-Urbana area. No summer classes - after four summers of class, I decided against doing that ever again. Instead, the majority of my time is devoted to interning, with the remaining hours of the day going to either my own projects or research. This blog post is (hopefully) part of a series of posts for this summer, detailing the highs, lows, and everything in between. This introductory post has quite the agenda:

Intel
new computer
backpack(s)??
living in Champaign
raspberry pi
podcasts
soda

Intel

I took my last final exam May 12th, and promptly packed up all of my belongings. The next day, I moved everything out of the dorm and back home. It was quite an eventful move out - I may even write a separate post about that day. When I got back, I dumped everything out of my suitcases and began re-packing a smaller subset of my stuff for the summer. Yes, even though school just ended, I had to move back down to Champaign that Sunday - I started work on Monday, May 16th.

As for work, I’m interning at Intel, as part of the software development tools team. Intel provides a tool called Intel Processor Trace, and the work I’m doing revolves mostly that. Once the summer is over, and more importantly, I am more confident in what I can and cannot talk about, I’ll write a post about that, too.

My first day officially started at 8 am, but the new employee training didn’t start until 1, so I had the morning to myself. I went grocery shopping and setup my desk in my apartment. The thing I was most anxious about - and didn’t learn about until a few days after - was whether or not I was eligible for some sort of employee discount. My desktop at the time was long overdue for an upgrade, and being an Intel employee (even if for just a summer) meant I had to at least try to get bleeding-edge performance.

New Computer

Few days after I started working, I stumbled upon the Employee Purchase Program site, and all my dreams came true. I was able to order a brand new i7-6700k for a new computer, heavily discounted. Three weeks into my internship, I ordered all of the parts for my new build.

i7-6700k
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7
16 GB DDR4 RAM (soon to be 32 GB, then 64)
Corsair 450D

The rest of my components I transferred over from my old build:

GTX 780ti
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SSD
some 1 TB HDD
Corsair AX-860 power supply

As I write this post, I’m still in Champaign, eagerly waiting for this upcoming weekend and my parts to arrive. I actually commute to and from home every weekend, because most of my friends are living closer to the suburbs, and, going home means my mom can cook for me and I can stock up on food for the week, rather than buying lunch everyday or trying to cook myself.

Backpack(s)

Backpacks, backpacks, backpacks. Or, to be less specific, bags. I think I have a bag problem. I have a lot of bags. I think each bag has a specific purpose - some sort of activity that greatly benefits from that bag style and no other ones. Which is why I have many bags, but four nice bags. Three of them are Timbuk2 - messenger, small backpack, and a massive, 40L roll-top - a high-quality and fantastic-looking bag company. Last one, and also the newest in the bag-clan, an Osprey. I recently discovered Osprey as a brand in general when I saw one in the wild and decided they look awesome. I also read about them a lot on r/buyitforlife, a subreddit that basically embodies my own purchasing style. I decided I wanted to get one with a wire-frame, since they push the actual bag away from your back and only the top and bottom touch, which greatly increases airflow and consequently decreases back-sweat.

I think I spent about three or four hours at the nearest REI checking out different bags, different sizes, different styles, but my indecisiveness didn’t let me pick one out. This is why credit cards are great - I walked out of REI with five different backpacks, fully knowing that I would return four of them, and maybe even all five if I really couldn’t decide. I didn’t really have time to test them out even more at home, so I just laid them out in my bedroom, and over the course of the next week, would have random encounters with different ones, until I eventually decided to just return them all. But, all hope was not lost. I had really liked Osprey’s Radial 34 - great design, amazing quality, and the wire-frame did exactly what I wanted. The pocketing perfectly suited my needs, and I was almost ready to keep that bag. However, the water bottle holders on the site were horrible. Rather than the common mesh, the radial had two zipper pockets (??) on the side for water bottles, and didn’t really hold anything in there at all. I usually forget to put on shoes before my backpack, so a lot of the time I’ll bend over to put on and tie my shoes with my backpack on. Every time I did that with the radial 34, one (or both) of the bottles fell out. And using stainless steel bottles meant that the life of the bottle would be cut down drastically, so I went back to the drawing board. After some more online research, I found the radial 26 - the 34’s smaller sized version. Osprey probably released the 26 after the 34, because the 26’s side water bottle holders were mesh! This bag was the one. I ordered that one online, and returned the other five, extremely satisfied with my new purchase. I’ve been using the bag for about a month now, and it’s fantastic. (I could probably even write backpack reviews …)

Living in Champaign

Not much to say here.

Raspberry Pi

For some reason, I have three raspberry pi’s (two 2nd ed, 1 first ed) and decided to actually put them to use this summer. The first project is controlling LED’s with my voice, hopefully using Siri. I’m planning on integrating it with HomeKit using an open-source node.js-based project called HomeBridge, which lets you add custom “home” items to HomeKit. The goal is to be able to turn them on and off, and set the color using a fairly standard (and small) color palette. I’m starting this project in the next few days - I just brought back my raspberry pi and breadboard kit from home yesterday. The LED’s I’m using I bought from adafruit a while ago (LINK HERE). I have 100 LED’s across 4 strands, which I’ve already taped to the ceiling, wall, and under my bed. I think it’ll be really cool once I’m done, and I can definitely transfer it to my apartment during the school year.

The second project is going to be a DIY Alexa. Amazon provides an excellent guide on how to set one up, so this “project” is really just Yasha-buys-parts-and-wires-them-together, but it’ll be really cool at the end and might even inspire a project for the third raspberry pi.

I don’t really have a third use for a pi yet. I do, however, want to build some sort of lock-checker (and maybe locker/unlocker). I usually forget if I actually locked the door or not, and want a super simple way to check that once I’m in class/at work/etc. I’m thinking something like going to a website, and it just reads out some sensor value that’ll tell me if it’s locked or not. I’m hoping I can build this during the summer as well, but I’d rather build the LED’s and DIY-Alexa first.

Podcasts

My dad drives a total of two hours a day as part of his commute, so he listens to podcasts during his drive almost every day. I’ve also really wanted to get into podcasts, but I never had something like a lengthy commute. Recently, I read online somewhere that some software engineers listen to music during work, as expected, but others also listen to podcasts, due to their low-commitment nature. You don’t really have to focus on it, and your eyes and hands can do something else. This past week or so I’ve been trying that out, and so far it’s been interesting. I follow @Gruber and @DaringFireball on Twitter, so his podcast “The Talk Show” was my go-to for the trial podcast. I actually care about the content he presents, though, which is why I have mixed feelings towards listening to podcasts while working.

Positive: If I get stuck while coding, I can just focus back to the podcast, and something is there for me to do for a bit and it’s a pretty great mental break. But when I am coding, it doesn’t distract me, whereas music typically does. I also get to (fairly passively) keep up with the tech scene, without spending work hours reading through Hacker News or Twitter.

Negative: It does get pretty distracting. I listened to an episode of The Talk Show with Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi and basically had to listen to the thing.

Soda

Speaking of The Talk Show, John Gruber opens ep-153 with a statement I completely agree with:

To be successful, you need three things:

A fussy way to make coffee, real good coffee

Carbonated water

A clicky keyboard

Yeah, basically spot-on for me.

I’m still working on the “fussy way” to make good coffee, but good coffee is definitely a high priority for me. Currently rocking a french press and some knock-off pour-over, but I’m hoping to have a Chemex and quality grinder by the end of the summer.

Intel’s fridge is stocked with LaCroix, my go-to carbonated water solution. Gruber makes his own using a SodaStream, but there’s plenty of LaCroix at the office (or at Costco …) and that works for me.

I also happen to own a Ducky Shine 3 with cherry MX blues (the super clicky ones) and I’ve now had it for two and a half years. I’m going to be replacing the keycaps with double-shot PBT sometime this summer, along with a thorough cleaning job.

Well, that wraps up Summer Sixteen’s first blog post.

HackIllinois 2016

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:40:00 +0000

This year,

HackIllinois 2016 was scheduled for the weekend of February 19-21. Since I’m a seasoned Hackathon Hacker, I decided to join staff and catch a glimpse into what it takes to run one of the best hackathons in the Midwest. The weekend before the event, we had a staff picnic, so that we could get together and make sure all of our plans were set in motion (and get our fancy staff jackets).

Here’s our group picture:

The Wednesday before,

our last staff meeting involved stuffing over 1200 swag bags for the hackers. In the bag, we gave out plenty of sponsor swag and some HackIllinois swag as well, including Facebook socks, a cool GitHub sticker, a metal HackIllinois-branded cup, a bottle of Soylent, and some HackIllinois stickers.

We had a lot of soylent.

My Friday began with coffee and homework.

(Spoiler: I didn’t finish the assignment…)

The rest of the day involved setting up rooms, banners, tables, etc. in the two buildings we were using for the event. Rather than going into much detail about setup, I think this screenshot describes it rather well:

We laid out a lot of snacks.

HackIllinois 2016: Day-by-Day

Friday

After a full day of running around, the majority of my night involved manning the Siebel “Help Desk.” Both buildings had a desk with at least one staff member the entire event, so that someone could handle any emergencies or just make sure the event runs smoothly. Since Friday was the first night, we had plenty of late arrivals checking in. I had the unfortunate responsibility of informing the hackers of whatever we had ran out of most recently (swag bags, t-shirts, lanyards…) and get them fed as fast as possible. We also had a lot of volunteers during the weekend, and they were also checking in every four hours or so, and needed things to do. And, of course, sponsors needed to be checked up on, to make sure they weren’t missing anything at all, like power strips, adapters, cables, water bottles, etc.

I also ventured downstairs to the basement prior to meals, to help organize the hackers into lines, make sure everyone was aware of the meal options, and how that specific meal/snack was being ran. I headed home around 2 or 3 AM, desperately needing a few hours of sleep and revival in the form of a shower. On to Saturday…

Saturday

A majority of hackers sleep between 4 and 8 AM, so HackIllinois didn’t really pick back up until about 8 AM, which coincides with breakfast. I arrived at about 7:30 to help with breakfast, and realized that we were terribly understaffed. It just so happens a lot of staff went home around the same time block, and so my arrival was really well timed. I was manning the help desk again for most of Saturday, but it was a lot calmer than Friday evening, because people were busy hacking away and nothing required staff’s immediate attention. In the evening, we were reimbursing gas receipts, and so our treasurer took over the help desk. Later in the night, we had Nerf, one of HackIllinois’ more popular attractions. I elected not to go, even though we had a staff vs. sponsor game.

By late Saturday, most of staff had realized we were really packed with hackers. Surprisingly, we weren’t running out of food, but rooms were packed and we ran out of almost all our extra provisions. We found out that we had gone about 400 hackers over our planned capacity, and this caused some interesting problems. Feeding 1200 hungry hackers is really hard, feeding 1600 hungry hackers is even harder. On Saturday night, at almost every hackathon Apple sponsors, they buy Insomnia cookies. HackIllinois is no different. The issue this time, was that, well, we didn’t have cookies for those 400 extra hackers, and Apple wasn’t able to get more money approved to buy extra cookies. Luckily, we save a lot of our budget for last minute purchases like these, so we decided to buy the remaining cookies ourselves. Insomnia doesn’t have local store phone numbers though, so we were waiting 20+ minutes with their corporate number trying to buy some more cookies, with little to no success. To expedite the process, we had a staff member run over to the campus store and place the order. Great! More cookies.

Two hours before these cookies were supposed to arrive, Core realized that Apple had already ordered sufficient cookies. We didn’t want to wait on the phone again, so I decided I would take an Uber to the store to cancel the order as fast as possible. Here’s the receipt I got from the Uber ride:

Yes, that’s correct. I never got out of the car. As we were arriving at the store, I was told that we were able to cancel the order over the phone, and my trip was no longer needed. I embarrassingly asked my driver if he could take me back, and then sat quietly in the car hoping that my Uber passenger rating wouldn’t go down because of this. After the ride, I headed back home, anxiously awaiting my shower.

Sunday

Before I left Saturday night, I planned on going back at about 7, so that I could help with breakfast setup and wrapping up the event. I set my alarm for 6:30 to allot ample time to get out of bed and make my way over to Siebel. That didn’t happen. I woke up at 10:30 and felt absolutely horrible as I checked Slack and saw fellow staff members transition from “where is he?” and “where are you?” messages to “looks like the alarm didn’t work” and “rip.”

Sunday was the last day, which meant a majority of staff was in the Union setting up for the closing ceremonies and expo, but I was asked to help with the hardware checkout, since we knew that the mad rush to return hardware always needs a few people to handle. Because of this, I got to chill in Siebel and work on homework due later that evening (which I did finish, to my own surprise) and reflect on the event. As soon as the ceremonies ended, all of the hackers quickly gathered their things and our Spark Cores and Pebble Steels to return. It ended up going a lot smoother than anticipated, more or less because of how calm we were. For some of the more expensive hardware, we had to sift through the box and make sure nothing was obviously damaged, and that everything was in the box before we handed back the hacker’s precious ID, while also reassuring them that their bus wouldn’t leave without them. After everyone left, we re-inventoried the hardware and shipped back whatever we had borrowed, and stowed away all of the things we personally owned.

Even though the weekend was great, this was the best part:

I met @Saurik!

State Farm, 2nd Semester

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:00:00 +0000

State Farm, My 2nd Semester

My second semester at UIUC started on January 19th. While classes weren’t scheduled on that Monday, I did have to attend 5 hours of onboarding/training for my spring 2016 internship: a systems intern at State Farm.

Research Park

State Farm is headquartered in Bloomington, IL, but operates a satellite office in Champaign, IL within the Research Park. Other companies in the Park include Yahoo, Agrible, AkunaCapital (which you can read about here), Caterpillar, and John Deere. The office I work out of is called the Research and Development Center. Essentially, Research Park companies hire talent like students - both undergrad and graduate - and faculty with the goal of building new technology.

The Office

When I arrive, I have to swipe in to enter the office. At first glance, it looks a little old-fashioned-IBM-cubile style, but there are some hidden more modern, Silicon-Valley touches. For example, I have a standing desk, there are free snacks, soda on tap (with Mountain Dew), and a coffee machine (which costs me $1).

My Desk

At my desk, I currently have four laptops, and two monitors. State Farm has a lot of security measures in place, and it’s critical that I abide by those measures. One of the laptops is my designated “State Farm intranet laptop.” That means that the only laptop I can check email on, or sign into Skype for Business, or even fill out my weekly timesheets. The other three laptops also serve various purposes: one of the MacBook’s is my personal laptop, which I take into the office in case I need to look at some of my other code in reference to what I’m working on, the other MacBook is the laptop that both has access to State Farm files and allows me to actually code, and the last laptop is basically “off-the-shelf” (I can literally do anything on it and no one will get mad at me).

AkunaCapital Visit

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 20:30:00 +0000

On January 13th,

I was scheduled to attend a job shadow at AkunaCapital in downtown Chicago.

My day began early, I had to catch a 6:45 AM train. I packed my trusty Timbuk2 messenger with my laptop and some resumes, and began to imagine what sorts of technology a financial technology firm would have in their office.

It was an especially chilly Chicago morning: high of 1, low of -9 (without wind chill…) but I still made it to the local station with time to spare. I arrived in the city fairly early - about 8 AM - and needed to be in the office by 8:30 AM.

This was intentional.

I really need some caffeine in the morning, and there just happened to be a Starbucks right next to the building I was headed to. I was originally going to walk from Union Station, but the wind helped convince myself otherwise. I ended up taking an Uber, and had plenty of time to get my badge, find the office, use the restroom if i needed to …

Last names are hard.

Good thing I had given myself some extra time, because whoever had put in my name in the guest system had incorrectly entered it. It happens all the time. However, they were quick to resolve the problem - my contact called the desk and made a new entry, using the proper last name, and I got my badge and went up to the 24th floor.

Their office is really beautiful. They recently moved in, on the previous Monday, just two days before I visited. I sat in the lobby waiting for the other student. Shortly after, our tour began.

First up: office tour.

After the tour, I got to spend about an hour from different engineers - one from every team - and hear how their specific role worked into the grand scheme of things. (I also observed how someone can use 8 monitors and still need more screen real-estate…)

There are internal web developers, that build the visualization tools for the traders. The traders decide what parameters to feed the automated trading tool, written by some other developers. And the coolest of all - there were algorithm developers, trying to figure out how to use past trades to best predict what other trades the automated system should make.

Feedback and Release Cycles

Up until this point, I was really awestruck. They were working with bleeding edge, extremely fast systems, and it seemed really rewarding. But then, I had the chance to speak with a manager, and he really was able to hook me even more. Here’s the thing: a company like Google, or Apple, or Microsoft - they have customers. Every time an engineer works on a piece of code, they can’t just roll it out. It gets lumped into 10, 20, maybe 1,000 other features and released after rigorous testing, and then, you are able to get feedback from the people you wrote the code for. But at Akuna, their customers are themselves. The traders who pick out the parameters sit on the other side of the office. When an engineer builds a new feature, they test for a day or two and deploy immediately. They can walk over and see their code in use, and immediately obtain feedback. This sort of rapid release and feedback cycle seems incredible.

This small, maybe 15x15 area, is where all the hard work of ~130 engineers ends up.

End of an amazing day

On my way back to Union Station, I found a different Starbucks and wrapped up a coding challenge on HackerRank, met up with some friends for dinner, and headed home.

That day really validated one of the two reasons: variety. Computer science is literally being used in every single industry. My goal, during these next few years, is to see the different areas I can work in after I graduate. The other reason I like computer science is accessibility, and I guess we’ll save that for another blog post.

New Things

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 20:53:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to blog for a long time.

A little while back, I finally set up this page. I whipped together a Jekyll page, threw it on GitHub Static Pages, and now here I am, blogging..

#blogging, at 3 am

So for all potential readers - here are some things I’d like to clear up:

###1. I am not a particularly good writer.

I always have struggled with writing in the past, and this blog will be no exception. expect plenty of grammar errors, poor word choice, and other face-palm moments.

###2. I do, however, enjoy describing my ideas.

I’ve always loved expressing my ideas, but joining ICDA (debate team) in high school really brought that to life. I figured this blog would serve as a collection of my thoughts, both short and long.

###3. There will be no consistency.

Expect no consistency in terms of content, length, formatting, and most importantly, some resemblance of a schedule. I’ll post stuff when I want to, whenever my course load drops a bit, or I find myself enjoying some excellent coffee.