Life@FB: Last Day of Bootcamp

9am, Facebook Headquarters: Cafe 18. My laptop is open next to a plate of kiwi and mango. It’s Friday and my last day of “bootcamp” at Facebook. Every person in the engineering organization – VP to fresh-outta-college – has to go through four to six weeks of fixing real bugs from all kinds of nooks and crannies of the product. I’d never done any Android programming at all but yesterday I had to figure out how to add a new feature to what might be the world’s most popular Android application. I was up until 1am getting it put together and then submitted my code for review. So I’m a little groggy.

Tomorrow morning I embark to Seoul where I’ll shortly be on stage in front of a few hundred developers explaining how to make their games more social. First, I’ll need to understand what the heck I’m talking about (eep). They really do throw you into the deep end here. Afterwards, I’m headed to Hong Kong, Taipei, and Manila to meet up with developers there. It’ll be very quick travel – I’m literally spending 20 hours in Manila, including sleep, but due to some lucky help from folks like Michelle Santos I’ll have a pretty packed itinerary to make best use of the time. And I’m packing some Ambien to catch some sleep on the plane.