trip to the Bay Area!

Lindsey and I are in Mountain View, sitting in the coffee shop in a nice bookstore on Castro Street. Like y'do.

We're out here because she was speaking at this very nice distributed databases industry conference (videos of all the talks should be online shortly!), and she was doing that because it's become clear that there's a strong relationship between her PL work and the stuff going on in the distributed systems world...

It's been an interesting experience, coming along for the ride. Everybody's been really friendly, but I've been kind of a third wheel the whole time. There's a lot to know about distributed systems, though, and it's fairly interesting. I went to some of the talks on Tuesday, and had a bunch of pleasant conversations with folks about their stuff and my stuff. Maybe most interesting for me -- the Basho folks have been working on integrating Solr (the Apache search engine) into their distributed database.

I guess I must admit that Solr is more interesting to me than distributed databases.

Also! On Monday I went to the 'Plex and had lunch with some folks from the Google Translate team; they're still friendly. Ran, unplanned, into Franz O. and some other guys from the team; he asked which language was I working on again? And would I prefer if they don't launch it until I graduate? ... he's always like this, oblique dark humor and implied semi-threats. It is kind of amazing and I told him to expect a job application pretty soon. He nodded and made a face like "that's reasonable."

Everybody wants to hire Lindsey out here. My mind has been running in circles, thinking about what kind of jobs we should get and where we should move. I want so many different things at once. I guess we'll have to make some decisions pretty soooooon. I hope.

(also! we've been hanging out with Martin and Lauryn a bunch, and that's rad, as always, yeaaahhhh!!)