I decided that this summer I’d like to write some more. So, I’ll be doing a weekly (ish) post about my internship at Yelp in San Francisco over the summer, where I’ll be working all summer building the infrastructure that makes Yelp tick. Using nothing more than a keyboard.
It’s amazing how much can get done on the first day. I’ve always thought that the first day had to be a boring orientation - people talking, interns sleeping, legal stuff and everybody staring at the clock. But, I actually got to write code on day 0. I mean, it wasn’t much code, but it was something. Plus, I learned all about tmux, linux configuration, and even a little bit of release engineering. All on the first day.
It didn’t make it any less terrifying though. Everybody, including the other interns, are incredibly smart and easily among the best in their fields. My mentor is a Linux guru, to say the least, on top of being great at Python, design, and knowing all of the intricacies of scaling Yelp’s backend. All of the interns come from very impressive schools with even more impressive resumes.
The rest of my week seemed to revolve around reading. So much reading. You never realize how much knowledge you need to write a line of code, until you have no knowledge. I never realized how much I value documentation. Interestingly enough, open source projects (popular ones, at least) have no shortage of docs, tutorials, blog posts and the like. Yet, companies build their own software. Software that only they use. Software that they document for only themselves. It’s a definite culture shock to moving from Googling everything to actually asking people and deciphering IRC channels. There’s a great startup idea somewhere - an Evernote for corporate docs that takes people’s notes about random things and organizes it into decent documentation.
So, it turns out that San Francisco has amazing food. Everything is organic and locally grown and relatively healthy and delicious. I told myself that I was going to go all foodie blogger and take pictures of all of my meals. I got about 3. I call that a win. Eventually, I’ll post them. But, I’ve never seen such a large density of good food in one place. I don’t know how they’ve done it - maybe its the wealth, Napa Valley nearby - but San Francisco seems like a foodie mecca. Even the sketchy open-till-2 pizza places that seem to be a retreat for the drunken house party set are surprisingly good.
Lastly, the thing that’s shocked me most is how “normal” the city is. With all of the news, I expected to see even more tech companies in the area. Dry cleaners selling out to office parks, Google Glasses on every face and Facebook t-shirts on every corner. It’s nice to remember that, despite the news, Silicon Valley still has stores and restaurants and fast food and normal people. And they listen to street signs. Weird.