Taking It Not Easy

Summer in NYC.

Somewhat funny I told myself that I'd take this year easy in January, when four months later I've started a new and much more intense job. I'm now a senior production engineer at WhatsApp, meaning I'll be writing all sorts of Erlang to deal with scalability issues.

I'm excited, since the role is on a scale I've never dealt with before, WhatsApp has over 2B daily active users! My peers seem very smart as well, so I'm hoping I learn a lot.

I took a three week vacation in Georgia before starting this job and spent around 25 hours learning Georgian, which is enough for me to realize that I don't want to learn anymore Georgian. This is similar to what I did in Bishkek back in 2017, where I mainlined a week of Russian intensive to see how much I wanted to learn Russian.

Georgian is a fascinating language, especially as it has an ergative case as well, which is similar to Kurdish. Tbilisi is also a great city, it's cosmopolitan, big, and has plenty of stuff for you to do. The countryside wine junket is also great, an excellent place to relax.

Returning to NYC has some benefits though, I've slid back into my old life easily, almost disturblingly so. Back to the office and the intense work environment should help develop me into becoming a better engineer.