At the end of third week we flew off to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California for a code sprint. We had a hackathon during the weekend and after that we vacationed in San Francisco for the rest of the week.

The hackathon was at the Facebook headquarters. It was a campus-style area with plenty of small buildings. We got a tour of the HQ and it was really amazing. It had an arcade, cafes, research laboratory, healthcare and so on. One could most likely live there.

Code Sprint

Our working room was a simple room with tables filled with smart people. The whole table in the picture was dedicated to the Ruby on Rails team.they The Lokki team from Helsinki was residing in another room.

In the beginning, the mentors made sure that everyone has the working environment set up and tests running. After that we started to look at random issues on the Rails repo. Since the team in Helsinki has so much time to spend in this project, we were given a special feature to work on. The rest of our time was spent figuring out how to implement the feature.

Attractions

After the code sprint we visited attractions in San Francisco. We went to see the must see places like Muir Woods, Alcatraz Island, Golden Gate bridge, and Twin Peaks.

Muir Woods

Muir Woods National Monument in an old redwood forest. We took an Uber from the City centre to the forest. It worked really well - summoning the car was really convenient with the app, the driver was really good, and and it was cheaper than the regular taxies.

The forest was gorgeous. Trees were nothing like the ones in Finland. One of the trees was set up so that we could go inside it.

We hiked in the forest aimlessly for a while before we called our driver to fetch us back. The area was so vast that one could easily spend days wandering there.

Golden Gate Bridge

We took a bus to the Golden Gate bridge, and arrived there just when it was starting to get dark. We didn’t cross the bridge, since it was quite long, but we walked to the first tower. There was quite a view to the San Francisco. Also, there was a sign that said it’s forbidden to throw missiles off the bridge. I have no idea why they specifically had to tell that.

As we left, the bridge closed for the night. It’s kinda weird that they don’t let people to cross the bridge during night.

Thoughts

All in all, the trip was a great success. I really enjoyed visiting Facebook and San Francisco. I feel like after this event the course has properly started. It’s especially nice that we now know what to do so we can be productive again.