• Met some really cool people, both interns and full-timers.
  • Ate freshly baked bread with self-churned butter. I approve of all company traditions that involve eating delicious things.
  • Got to discuss Lockhart’s Lament, the zone of proximal development, and other metacognitive ideas.
  • Participated in acroyoga.
  • Saw fantastic Jurassic Park cosplays in celebration of Jurassic World. There’s a dinosaur costume in the office, it’s great.
  • Discovered a depressing fact with Sal over lunch - an ice cream Snickers has fewer calories than a regular Snickers. So from a certain point of view, ice cream is healthier than Snickers.
  • In my first week, improved quality of life in the code deploy process.
  • Successfully nerdsniped three engineers for two hours with a puzzle from a puzzle hunt.
  • Met a software developer who has played Hatoful Boyfriend, the pigeon dating simulator. Pigeons forever! Okosan is best bird!
  • Built an automated backup system for Khan Academy’s mailing list data.
  • Wrote some unit test infrastructure that made it easier to test behavior on Khan Academy endpoints.
  • Found and fixed a cron job that had been silently broken for 9 months, which involved some of the best debugging I’ve ever done.
  • Added ASCII art of an Arcanine to the codebase, although with less alliteration.
  • Did some real, honest to God machine learning for the annual Healthy Hackathon. We computed similarities in a sparse user-video matrix. Yes, we were trying to be Netflix. No, we did not replicate Netflix in a week. Yes, it was still really cool.
  • Drank far, far too much tea. It’s not my fault the office stocks unsweetened tea, and it’s also not my fault the office is in walking distance of several milk tea places.
  • Speaking of which, got into a nuanced discussion about milk tea linguistics. By my understanding, “pearl milk tea” is the standard around Palo Alto, “boba” is the standard almost everywhere else, and “bubble tea” is used interchangeably with “boba” on the East Coast.
  • Also got into a discussion about cloning ethics with other interns in a Chinese restaurant. We then realized we were a real life version of the dining philosophers problem. Luckily, we did not deadlock because we had sufficiently many chopsticks.
  • Played D&D for the first time. I shot an arrow right into somebody’s face, it was wicked. Somewhat less wickedly, a snake almost Total Party Killed us.
  • Taught two interns how to play Dominion, and totally kicked their butts while doing it.
  • In return, got my butt totally kicked in Medici, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and Tzol’kin.
  • Actually won a few games of Coup!
  • …after losing many more games of Coup.
  • Also, gained a new appreciation for the Coup metagame. I got to pretend to be a Captain that was pretending to be an Ambassador! And I almost got away with it too.
  • For the talent show, failed to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. I still won a prize: a heat pack in the shape of a heart.

  • Had a really, really good time.