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2017 London Triathlon

I realized that I only ever posted this on Facebook, but I wanted to share this here since I have my other Triathlon results here as well.

This was my first Olympic-length triathlon. I did a bit of Swimming training, cycled to work regularly throughout the previous year, and ran mostly during Ultimate frisbee games.

Total Time: 02:56:38. I was quite happy to finish in under 3 hours!

SectionDistancePace TimePlace
(of 1373)
Total Time
Swim1.5 km02:21 min/100m00:35:20104800:35:20
T100:04:2541600:39:45
Bike40 km29.22 km/h01:22:0954702:01:54
T200:02:5126202:04:44
Run10 km05:11 min/km00:51:5574602:56:38
An image I snapped of the details results screen.

Ski Trip to Val Thorens, Les Trois Vallees

I just returned Saturday night from an amazing trip to the French Alps with frisbee team friends. It was both my first time skiing in the Alps and my first week-long ski trip. I hope to do both again (I actually have another ski trip to the Alps planned already, but it’s only for an extended weekend).

The weather gave us a little bit of everything, including a three days of glorious sunshine, a few days of snow, some crazy wind, and combinations of the above, especially on the last day.

Overall a great experience.

2017 New Year’s Resolutions

  • Commute at least half the time via bike
  • Journal or blog at least once per week
  • Travel to 12 countries

Mega Life Update

In January, 2016, I moved to London to spin up a new Source Control team in London for Facebook. So far, the experience has been good — the team here is solid, and living in London has been a good experience. The main thing I need to do more of is travel to the rest of Europe.

In an age of easy sharing, it’s easy to get out of the habit of longer-form writing. However, I have found longer-form writing to be useful for me, so I’m going to strive for more regular updates in this place. I know many people have said such things before; let’s see how I do.

Four Years at Facebook

Today marks the completion of my 4th year of employment at Facebook. From eager anticipation and the first week, though my graduation from bootcamp and my first faceversary, to two years of management experience and now a chance to go back to engineering, it has truly been a roller-coaster ride in every sense of the metaphor — fears and thrills, ups and downs, highs and lows.

I celebrated the day by helping my Ultimate Frisbee team, the Feral Cowsbreak seed, even if only for a day. I think tomorrow will  be a somewhat less restrained celebration.

Though I don’t know what the future holds, for now I’m sticking with Facebook. To many more highs and not too many lows!

Faceversary

Today marks one full year that I’ve been working at Facebook. It has been the most consuming, thrilling, and educational work experience I could imagine.

Looking back at what I’ve already done — from hacking on MySQL to presenting at a conference to a packed house; from taking ownership of core modules to helping decide the direction of Facebook’s infrastructure; from pushing code to 300 then 400 and now over 500 million active users to debugging site issues at an unprecedented scale… every experience has helped me grow as a person and an engineer.

Facebook surrounded me with some of the brightest people in the world to work on some of the most interesting technical challenges anywhere, while providing the support to make it possible and the autonomy to make it my own. I could not have asked for a better job.

Here’s looking forward to what I’ll be able to accomplish in my next year.

Scheming

This month should be a good and busy one. I have been scheming over the last few days, and this is what I have come up with so far for the rest of the year:

  • Post pictures from Peru on this blog (these photos are already posted on Facebook)
  • Post pictures from Australia and New Zealand here and on Facebook (I’m way behind on this front).
  • Bring the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery up-to-date.
  • Swap my Apple Macbook Pro for a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with Windows 7 at work. My plan is for this to also become my main laptop; my current laptop, Graphitica, a Dell D630, will go to my wonderful mom. I will miss the touchpad on the Mac, but I think that pretty much everything else will get better for me with this swap.
  • Help the new housemate, Jasmine, move in. This will probably involve finding a truck that I can borrow for a weekend.
  • Drive the Saturn back to Washington for Thanksgiving; leave it there, and fly back to SFO (this will lower the car pressure on the house, which after Jasmine moves in, will be at 5. Returning my car to Washington will lower that to 4.) As long as I can occasionally borrow a housemate’s car, I will be fine with respect to transportation.
  • Have a few good contributions to Drizzle’s development

That is all for now. More schemes may come.