Another year, another Terra.do course completed. Having enjoyed Terra.do’s 12-week flagship course, “Climate Change: Learning for Action”, I decided to enroll in their 4-week baby course, “Software Stacks in Climate Change”. Though it’s but a wee little course, it delivered a strong punch. At a price of $500 (even less if you use a referral code or can get it partially reimbursed by your employer), I found the course to be well worth the time and money. Read on for my full review!

P.S. If you decide to enroll in LFA, you can get a 20% discount by using this referral link.

Why I enrolled

It’s not hard to believe that many of the skills tech workers employ can transfer in some very direct ways to roles in the climate space. My role as a Developer Relations Engineer may not have a direct equivalent in the climate tech space (yet 👀), but certainly there’s room for software engineers, product managers, content creators, user researchers, technical writers… all of the roles that more or less combine into my work as a DRE. The purpose behind my enrolling in this course wasn’t to show myself that there’s space for technical skills in the climate sphere, though you’d certainly learn that if you don’t believe it already. Rather, I was looking for first-hand practice with and deeper exposure to some of the ways in which software is a driving force in climate solutions.

I wanted to learn about and dig into data sets and libraries that are actually used in building real world climate-focused applications. And through that practice, I hoped to build competence, confidence, and perhaps motivation, to advance my own capacity to engage in the climate tech space. Put more simply, I enrolled to lower the barriers between myself and actually building climate solutions. This goal is admittedly rather open-ended, which I think had some bearing on my personal outcomes from the course – I’ll get to that later. Nevertheless, the course absolutely met my goals.

Your reasons for considering the course might be different from mine, but I hope you can leverage my experience to decide whether the course may be fruitful for you, and how you might make the most of it if you too decide to enroll.

Course Format & Content

You can find the latest schedule on the course website.

4 weeks of content were spread across 5 weeks:

• Week 1: Intros
• Week 2: Software x Climate Landscape | Public Data Sources
• Week 3: Energy Modeling | Software/Hardware Interfaces
• Week 4: Break / extra time to work on final projects
• Week 5: Peer reviews | Presentations

The content was delivered in 2 main formats: live Zoom sessions, which mixed lecture and discussion, and virtual “classes” in the Terra.do learning portal, which mainly consisted of curated links to articles related to the week’s topics. The class also had a Slack channel for announcements, info sharing amongst classmates, questions to instructors, final project ideation, and all that jazz.

The live Zoom sessions happened 1-2 times per week and lasted an hour, with an additional, optional half hour for Q+A. I would’ve loved to not use Zoom, particularly because the chat feature is limited and just buggy enough to be an annoyance, but all in all it worked well for the purposes of the course.

I might’ve preferred more lecture and less discussion given how short the course is (and based on an in-class poll, I wasn’t alone), but the instructors struck a near-perfect balance. The deep-dive sessions of weeks 2 and 3 delivered some really fascinating content, ranging from technical breakdowns to case studies from the industry. There was minimal content around the science of climate change, but the initial deep-dive – Software x Climate Landscape – laid the foundation for deeper discussions around software’s critical role in climate solutions across industries. For each deep dive, the virtual classes and assignments offered further reinforcement.

When it came to the virtual “classes”, I was skeptical at first to see that these were really just lists of readings. Frankly, it felt lazy next to the dozens of slides of content I’d come to expect from Terra based on my experience with ‘Learning for Action’. That said, my skepticism dwindled quickly when I realized (1) the fact of there being minimal slides and only 1-3 readings per class made it easier for me to maintain focus and retain the information, unlike the occasional information overload I felt in LFA; and (2) the readings were actually really well selected and engaging.

Assignments

While the live Zoom sessions and virtual classes laid the foundation and scaffolding, I found that the assignments were where the course really took shape. There were 4 assignments overall, which spanned the first 3 weeks, culminating in a final project. All of the assignments were completed in Hex notebooks, which was a new tool for me but easy enough to navigate and quite similar to Jupyter notebooks.

In every assignment, the instructors had put together some starter code to build upon, with plenty of comments explaining the overall intent of the notebook and what each piece of code did within it. In between blocks of code were interactive data visualizations that invited us to explore and reconfigure the data to see what sense we could make of it. This design made it possible for non-software engineers (almost 50% of the students, if I remember correctly!) to complete the assignments without having to know much about coding. For those with more coding experience, the instructors offered suggestions for further investigation, making the assignments very choose-your-own-adventure. Assignments weren’t graded, but you do need to turn in your completed Hex notebook with some remarks about what insights you derived in order to receive a course completion certificate (like this one! Isn’t it pretty?). Plus, the instructors read through every assignment and leave comments ranging from recommended enhancements or questions to some variation of “Great work!”.

One example – without going into too much detail – was the “Home energy model” assignment. In this Hex notebook, the instructors created a “toy model” to simulate a home’s energy usage based on some basic inputs like location and window direction. It combined those inputs with a public dataset – historical weather data provided by NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) and fetched through pvlib – to produce a timeseries of energy usage which could in theory be used for things like minimizing home energy usage through smart device optimization. The assignment made a bunch of simplifications, but even so it was a powerful example of a piece of software that could actually get us (humanity) closer to un-screwing ourselves.

At the same time as each assignment took a piece of the climate tech landscape and made it more concrete and accessible, it also imbued for me a sense of possibility around climate efforts more broadly. To me, this was one of the course’s greatest accomplishments.

I should also note that the software/hardware deep-dive assignment provided the option of ordering your own IoT kit to set up a sensor which would collect CO2 readings to be leveraged by the Hex code. I and several others opted out of this piece, but many students who partook lauded the challenge of it.

Final Project

The assignments culminated in the final project, which spanned the last 2 weeks of the course and which was even more of an open-ended adventure than the rest of the coursework. While this certainly added to the challenge and the mental bandwidth required to actually produce something meaningful, on the whole I found the open-ended approach to be really exciting and inspiring. On the one hand, I was stressed about the decision paralysis that came with the freedom to pick any direction for the project. On the other hand, going through the exercise of brainstorming potential problem areas and uncovering ideas waiting to be explored was genuinely fun and left me feeling optimistic.

To the instructors’ credit, they did provide some suggested project ideas and granted access to the backlog of past students’ projects, so you have the option of picking from a selection of ideas. The open-ended, at times paralyzingly broad approach was largely self-inflicted to be sure. In fact, the “come up with your own project” path was deemed a “stretch” according to the provided guidelines:

The other “stretch” I undertook was to join a team rather than work independently, which turned out to be the more common choice with about 10 people working individually and about 20 on teams of 2-5. I think either approach would’ve been ok; I’d originally planned to fly solo, largely so that I could avoid imposing my busy schedule onto a team, but I was lured into a group by a persuasive PM with an idea that was loosely related to mine (thanks Zach :D).

At the end of the day, I contributed a lot more technical research than actual working code, which I feel just okay about. This was a byproduct of the level of complexity of what I was trying to solve for, the limitations of the existing landscape and tooling, and the [insufficient] amount of time I had set aside for the project. Still, the thought experimentation and the deep dive into a part of the climate tech landscape I hadn’t touched before was totally worthwhile, as were the exploratory conversations I had with my team. I only wish I had more to show for my contribution than a write-up of my findings and some demo code built on sample data whose format (HPXML, i.e. “Home Properties XML”) was too bespoke to be incorporated into our project in time. I think this outcome was less a reflection of how the course and the final project were designed than it was a reflection of my own expectations around and approach to such a complex topic; in that sense, it was a learning experience beyond the climate tech aspect.

Ultimately, everyone presented their final projects, and it was impressive and motivating to see the level of accomplishment across such a wide spectrum of skill sets and interests. Projects ranged from comical storytelling about the climate impact of money trees, to backend systems for grid energy management, to data analysis of grocery item carbon impact. Many students crushed the course’s advertised goal of walking away with a “resumé-worthy” project. While I don’t count myself among those students, I believe I could’ve achieved that outcome if I’d made it an explicit goal for myself. Now with the course behind me, I feel confident that I could develop a resumé-worthy climate tech project on my own using the skills and knowledge I acquired through the course.

Instructors

The course was taught by couple Jaime and Jason, two former Big Tech employees who pivoted to working at climate tech startups before ultimately founding their own climate tech consulting company called Option Zero. Jaime and Jason know their stuff, and thank goodness they’re not gatekeeping it. With such relevant real-world experience, they were able to incorporate in-depth case studies and grounded knowledge into the course instruction, which made the content more compelling while also making the whole of climate tech feel more within reach – after all, these people succeeding in climate tech are right here talking to you.

Jaime and Jason clearly care about empowering students to find their paths in climate tech, and it showed in the quality of the content, their commitment to being available to students, and in their level of engagement with the assignments and final projects. They were fantastic resources for the array of questions that came up related to assignments, final projects, or whatever curiosities arose along the way. Considering their dedication, in combination with the fact that they solicited feedback from students regularly, I see the course only getting better and better with each run.

Classmates

The diversity and commitment of the student body was one of the most appealing and inspiring aspects of the course. Even though a majority of students worked in tech in some facet, the industries, roles, and experience levels varied widely.

It was genuinely wholesome to see firsthand that so many talented and kind people are interested in tackling climate change through software. Just like in LFA, the course created a community that fostered support and curiosity; it was a safe space to ask possibly naive questions, to propose ideas, and to make connections. I even met up with another classmate local to NYC (and there would've been more classmates too if it weren’t for you meddling sickness! *shakes fist at flu*). By the end of the class, having watched the final project presentations, I felt in awe of my classmates and the change that’s possible through a group of merely ~30 students.

Final Thoughts

With the course now a month behind me, I’m glad I made the decision to enroll. I feel I’ve opened the door to climate that much wider. I only wish I’d set aside more time for the assignments and final project so that I could’ve invested more fully for a greater return.

Now the question is whether I’ll actually carry forward what I’ve learned from the course and apply it directly – in personal projects, a 20% project at work, or a career move. I can’t answer that for sure yet. But I can say the question has become less one of “whether” I will get more hands on with climate and more so “when and how”.

Even as I question whether my path in climate will leverage the knowledge I’ve picked up in this course, I see that taking the course has reaffirmed my investment in working on climate in general. I’ve enrolled in the NYC Trash Academy, and I’ve continued to be involved in climate communities like Greenglers at Google and, of course, the Terra.do community. I’m more optimistic about climate than I was when I started, and my thinking about climate problems now has an additional constructive lens through which to understand the issues and ideate paths to solving them.

Maybe the best gift this course gave me was the sweet taste of building climate solutions. Now, I’m hungry for more.

Free Money

In case you missed it, note that you can get a 20% discount by using this referral link.

By all means, skip ahead to The Trip if you’re not here for personal musings.

It feels like eons since I last touched this blog. I’d like to chalk it up to having too much going on in my life – and to a certain degree, that’s true – but the truth of the matter is that I’ve simply been pushing it off. I owe it mostly to the paradox of choice and the terrifying trench that is the blank page, but also to the personal progress I’ve been making in my social life. I’m investing more into friendships that require me to be vulnerable in a way I maybe wasn’t willing to be in the past. It’s not vulnerability in the sense of being open and emotional – I’ve never felt the need to hide what I think or how I feel (perhaps, at times, to my detriment). Rather, it's vulnerability in the sense of initiating conversations that open me up to rejection, inviting distant friends to spend time together even though I know there’s a good chance I’ll find myself caught in awkward silences or the loop of questioning whether I should’ve said that. And of course there's the humbling recognition that I spend a great deal of energy caring what other people think of me. Setting aside the emotional bandwidth required to be vulnerable in this way, investing more into relationships has meant spending more time outside of myself and my own creative pursuits. Even the creative pursuits I know I’m not deliberately avoiding in the name of socialization – mainly, painting and coding – have been tabled in the name of deepening friendships.

I feel conflicted about my new priorities. On the one hand, I’d always been one to succumb easily to FOMO and a self-consciousness around the size of my friend circle (or the fact of having a few treasured 1:1 friendships in lieu of a “circle” of friends). Not to mention, I give great weight to the notion that people confronted with death seem to unanimously wish they’d invested more into relationships and less into work. From a Coco-esque standpoint, we might as well fade into the nothingness of eternity if we don’t live on in the memories of ones who loved and valued us.

On the other hand, I started the year with grand ambitions of feeding my entrepreneurial and creative muscles by dedicating my time to new paintings and new coding projects, particularly in a time when I find that I’m hardly coding at work except when I’m translating Google Ads API code examples into Perl from other languages. Even if I have meaningful interpersonal connections, did I really live my life to the fullest if I didn’t create something of value for the world?

Of course, that’s a very high stakes way of framing the tradeoffs of socialization vs. creative work. In my most philosophical moments, I remember that nothing matters anyway, and we’re all likely to die in this simulation that failed to counteract the destructive potency of climate change in time to prevent the apocalypse.

And so the best thing I can do is what brings me joy. Being productive creatively brings me joy; feeling like I’m a part of the solution to climate change brings me joy (even if anything I do is a drop in the bucket compared to the carbon footprint I accrue by air travel); exploring brings me joy; expanding my worldview brings me joy; feeling loved and valued, of course, brings me joy. I’ve been spending more time this year than ever investing into my friendships, and through that I’ve also spent more time than ever joy-seeking by traveling and undertaking novel experiences. Which leads me here, to this moment, zigzagging my narrative path towards the intended subject of this writing: my travels in and around Japan.

Japan has long been at the top of my list of travel destinations, and I never dreamed it’d be accessible to me this early in life. Ever since watching [an ‘80s American take on Japan in] the formative film of my childhood – Kidsongs: I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing – it’s held major appeal. Of course, several years and several Nintendo games later, I’d developed a more holistic picture of Japan. Now, at a time in my life when I’m investing more into creating meaningful experiences with friends, there was no better way to check off this beckoning box than by instigating a Japan trip with a circle of friends I’ve found myself slowly ingratiating myself with in the years since college. Deepening friendships? Check. Fostering new experiences? Check. Broadening my world view? Check! Doing my part to save the planet? Well… How do you define personal responsibility within a system that’s set up to enable, even encourage, counterproductive choices at scale?

Prefatory Conclusion

With Japan now six months behind me, and my schedule finally calming TF down, I wanted to give the trip the reflection it’s due. Of course, the hope is that this writing will serve not only me and my anxious need to milk personal development out of every opportunity, but also you and your curiosity about the experience of traveling to Japan for the first time. This is my best articulation of my travels in Japan: highlights of the experience and what I observed about the country and its culture.

The Trip

If you’re here for recommendations, you can find them bolded. Take what you need, and nothing more.

2 weeks in Japan in March: an Itinerary

Altogether, my friends and I – 6 of us in total – were in Japan for 12 days. We debated several itineraries and ultimately landed on this one, which spanned several cities between Tokyo and Miyajima:

Getting between cities by train

We managed to go to a lot of cities considering we weren’t even there for a full 2 weeks. While this was a lot of travel, it didn’t feel excessive, largely because of the renowned Japanese rail system. Coming from the U.S., where train travel is comparatively uncommon, impractical, and expensive, traveling on the Japanese rail system was one of the highlights of the trip. Even the time spent in stations waiting for our trains was part of the fun, as long as we weren’t rushing to get to our train. The stations housed a bounty of restaurants, bakeries, and other shops, creating an atmosphere that was something between Grand Central and a high traffic shopping mall.

We were able to use our JRail passes for almost every leg of our journey, though it did require some planning and might’ve added a few hours of train travel overall. Admittedly, it helped that a couple friends in the party had gone to Japan before and could take the lead on some of the navigation. Using the ticketing machines at the rail stations wasn’t always simple, and I witnessed at least a handful of tourist groups standing around the machines collectively assessing which buttons to push, but it wasn’t so bad after a couple uses (and there were far more than a couple). To figure out which trains to take, we mainly relied on the Navitime app, which let us filter the options to only those that accepted JRail passes. I never calculated how much money we saved by using the JRail pass, but with how much we used it, I have to believe the savings were substantial.

Accommodations

In planning our trip, we decided that we would rather have a “home base” when possible, rather than trying to find separate accommodations for every destination, mainly so that we wouldn’t have to carry our luggage with us every time we went to a new city. For that reason, we spent about a week of our trip at a single Airbnb in Nishinari Ward, Osaka, and made day trips to other cities from there, the furthest of which was probably a ~2.5 hour train trip to Miyajima. The Airbnb was perfect for its ease of access to Osaka station from the nearby metro station, and for the quiet neighborhood.

Other than our Airbnb in Osaka, we stayed at Ajisai Onsen Ryokan in Hakone, and two hotels in Tokyo. Several people had advised staying in a ryokan while in Japan, and I’d second that advice. It was fun to have a more traditional Japanese experience, even though we didn’t take full advantage of all the typical ryokan amenities – namely, the meals. We did take advantage of the private, indoor onsen, and all these months later I still cherish the peace I experienced while lounging in the hot water, inside a spacious room made of natural wood and stone, listening to nothing but the constant stream of water pouring into the bath.

The hotels we stayed at were decent – by the time we booked, our options were rather limited, so we ended up in tiny rooms with twin beds in one, and sharing queen beds in a large (by Tokyo room standards) suite in the other. Tokyo pricing was easily the highest of the trip, so booking further in advance would have been the way to go; alas, we were booking our March accommodations in January, so we couldn’t be so choosy. For that matter, I’d recommend booking as early as possible, ideally more than four months in advance, particularly if you’re able to find accommodations with flexible cancellation policies. We might’ve gotten lucky with accommodations because of the timing of our trip, as I think many travelers were going to Japan in the weeks after us in anticipation of the cherry blossoms, but we nonetheless had slim pickings when it came to ryokans and affordable-but-nice Tokyo hotels.

Highlights of the trip

I’ll spare you the exhaustive list of things we did on our trip. Instead – and in no particular order – here are some of my favorite aspects of our travels in Japan, with recommendations bolded.

Walking around

My absolute favorite way to experience a new place is simply to walk around as much as time allows. Sprinkle some delicious meals and snacks throughout a day of exploring built or natural environments on foot and I’m content. Lucky for me all of the cities we visited were highly walkable, and all my travel companions were accustomed to plenty of walking from living in NYC. On average, I walked over 24,000 steps per day while in Japan.

Walking around Japan was a constant process of discovery. We discovered adorable restaurants and shops, quaint gardens, historic temples and shrines interspersed among modern architecture, thrift markets, arcades, public artworks, modestly picturesque streets, infinite microcosms of Japanese culture.

Recommendations:

• Wander around Kurashiki’s historical quarters to admire the old canal and the stately architecture.
• Explore the bamboo forest and the monkey park of Arashiyama in Kyoto.
• Walk through the Open Air Museum in Hakone.
• Leave yourself time to just wander! There's so much to take in, you can't go wrong with just zig zagging to your heart's desire.

Nature everywhere

Walking around so much confers the additional pleasure of noticing and reveling in the abundance of nature and natural elements throughout Japan. It’s impossible to overstate the beauty and the awe-inspiring quality of Japan’s natural landscapes, and its cityscapes that incorporate greenery and nature-inspired architecture. It’s a beauty that reveals itself at every scale – in the moss covering an old stone wall, in the vibrant pink and red blooms that pop in a garden of yellows and greens, in the trees that stretch their arms over centuries-old paths, in the parks that offer a place of peace and contemplation amongst the city hustle, and in the mountains that remind us how puny we are.

Coming from upstate New York, I’m no stranger to mountainous landscapes and vast greenery. But Japan’s natural landscapes were something else, filled with plant species I’d never seen in-person, or at least not so extensively. Not to mention the animal encounters. It was as if I’d been drag-and-dropped directly into a Studio Ghibli film.I wish the forest spirits could transport me back there now.

Recommendations:

• Travel the winding roads of Hakone and take in the beauty of the luxuriously plant-coated mountainscapes. While you’re there, take the Hakone Ropeway up to Owakudani for some active sulfur vents and hot springs, then take it down to Togendai for a pirate ship ride on the lake. If you’re up for a short hike, head down the Old Tokaido Stone Paved Road ending with a warm drink at the Amazake Tea House (but don’t go too late or else you’ll find yourself stranded, as the buses don’t run all day and rideshares aren’t really a thing there).
• Find an outdoor onsen amongst stone and trees. All the better if it comes with a view.
• Explore the gardens at the Tenryuji Temple, and stop in for a traditional zen buddhist meal (all vegetarian!) at the Tenryuji Temple Shigetsu.
• Get up close and personal with the chillest of deer friends in Miyajima.
• Walk through Momijidani Park in Miyajima for some beautiful maples (I hear they’re even more stunning come autumn) and then head up Mount Misen for horizonless vistas.

Food

You already know the food in Japan is incredible. Even as a vegetarian*, and despite some challenges maintaining my vegetarianism on my trip, the food in Japan was one of my highlights. I ate so much mochi and fried vegetables, and I discovered an unexpected love of cabbage! Besides the food itself, the experience of eating out in Japan is distinct. I especially enjoyed seeing solo eaters in little counter booths, particularly at ramen shops and curry houses. It’s hard for me to imagine dining solo in the U.S. without feeling socially awkward about it, and I’ve felt that discomfort while dining solo in Europe. I could certainly stand to grow personally when it comes to my comfort level dining out alone, but it wouldn’t hurt if solo dining was as common here in the West as it is in Japan. Another difference that struck me was that inflexible (physically) Americans likely struggle with some of the restaurants whose majority seating is on the floor at low tables; I for one can only sit criss-cross applesauce for so long before I need to adjust, lest I irrevocably become a pretzel.

I’m hesitant to even make recommendations because I think so much of the fun here was in the spontaneity. Besides, many of the places we went to were places we just stumbled upon. That said, I want you to experience the joyest of joys I experienced, so I’ll recommend my favorites.

*If you're looking for tips as a vegetarian in Japan, I'd recommend this article from Never Ending Voyage, and especially the printable "I'm a vegetarian" cards they link from Just Hungry.

Recommendations:

• Okinomiyaki at Okinomiyaki-Kaji in Hakone (they made mine with no meat or bonito flakes, just cheese, cheese, more cheese, cabbage, and some veggies)
• An all-vegetarian meal at Tenryuji Temple Shigetsu in Kyoto
• Curry at CoCo Ichibanya Curry (a completely unoriginal but wholehearted recommendation)
• A Japanese take on American diner food at Sad Cafe in Osaka (the food isn’t great per se, but it’s certainly a charming and cozy experience)
• Izakaya restaurant in Kyoto
• Okayama local cuisine TORAIYA in Kurashiki
• Kinako, mochi, ice cream dessert from Sweets Kamakura in Kurashiki
• Black sesame buns at Gomafukudo Kurashikiten in Kurashiki
• Croissant manju – a novel take on a classic, filled, Miyajima treat – at Toriiya (I recommend the cheese-filling)
• Banana ice cream at Banana Biyori in Tokyo (there was a surprising amount of banana flavored desserts in Japan. If this one isn’t convenient for you, I’d recommend trying a banana dessert elsewhere, if bananas are your thing)

Kind strangers

It feels cliched to remark on the kindness of strangers in Japan, and yet it’d be ingenuine not to. It’s not that the hospitality was fantastic everywhere we went – the service at our 2 hotels, for instance, wasn’t noticeably better than what I’d expect from your average two or three star hotel in the U.S. But in countless interactions – across restaurants, shops, and train stations – it really felt like people welcomed us there, and wanted us to enjoy our experience of Japanese culture. Despite communication barriers, the kind-spirited reception was clear – in the smiles, the willingness to spend extra time trying to understand my dietary restrictions (and the sincere apologies when accidents happened), the attempts to meet us halfway with some English, and the generally generous vibes people put out towards us.

Once, we were waiting on the local train platform in Osaka, and a uniformed employee at the station approached us. We thought perhaps we’d done something wrong and he was coming to give us a talking to, but once he had our attention he simply asked where we were from. It quickly became apparent that he was asking about our trip as a means of both welcoming us and practicing his English. I don’t want to condescend by calling this man adorable, but I respectfully insist that he was; the brief interaction filled my cup.

In another instance, my friend left his bag with some… er… very important travel documents in it on the train that had promptly left the station before he noticed. Relying heavily on Google Translate™, he spoke with the employees at the station to inform them of the situation and explain what train it was, where on the train it was, and how they could identify the items. They instructed us to return later to check on the situation, and when we came back after a few hours, they had recovered my friend’s stuff after someone had turned it in at the next station. If that had been New York, I’m not sure he’d have ever seen his stuff again.

If it’s beginning to sound like all of the kind strangers work at train stations, I assure you they’re everywhere. I even received a welcome message from the barista at a mall Starbucks. Was he being normal levels of welcoming, or was he into me? We may never know (but hey, cute Starbucks employee in Namba City in Osaka, hmu if you’re reading this…)

There were, of course, some less polite encounters. Once I was corrected at a shrine for praying, bowing, and clapping out of order (I just copied the order of the woman ahead of me. Here’s the proper shrine etiquette if you want to be in the know). I’m not convinced she was being impolite; she wasn’t wrong if she assumed I’d prefer to pay my respects with proper etiquette, though the correction was unexpected. We were also turned away at multiple restaurants that were clearly open and bustling. Apparently it’s not uncommon in Japan for restaurant hosts to turn away groups of foreigners (now you know). Altogether, these less “friendly” experiences were trivial in comparison to the overall sense of kindness we enjoyed.

Theme Parks

I wasn’t sure if I’d regret visiting theme parks in Japan instead of using that time to experience the “real” Japan. In hindsight, I definitely feel I made the right choice incorporating them into my travels. I went to two theme parks whilst in Japan: Universal Studios Japan and Tokyo DisneySea. Not everyone I was traveling with had the same enthusiasm for theme parks as I did, so we ended up splitting up accordingly – one of the perks of traveling in a group of 6.

It turned out that my concern about theme parks not giving me an authentic Japanese experience was a bit unwarranted. While the theme parks were reminiscent of Disney and Universal Studios in the U.S., they were also markedly different in many ways that felt true to what I’d learned about Japanese culture during the rest of my travels. One such difference was the apparent willingness of people in Japan to wait in long lines. Of course there are long lines at theme parks in the U.S. as well, but Japanese theme parks took it to another level. And it wasn’t confined to ride lines – there were several 50+ person lines for small, specialty snack items. The threshold of “worth the wait” was heavily skewed to where I couldn’t be sure if line length said anything about the quality of the thing people were waiting for. My friend and I once waited in line for about 90 minutes for a rollercoaster ride that lasted no more than 60 seconds; at first we thought for sure it was pausing to build excitement before embarking on the second leg of the journey. How salty we were when we learned we were wrong. Later, when we were in Tokyo DisneySea, it wasn’t a hard decision to pay an extra ~$15 to skip a ~3 hour line.

On a more positive note, I was delighted to see that theme park goers in Japan really lean into their themed attire. In Disney in the U.S., it’s not uncommon to see Mickey ear headbands, but it does feel like a novelty that’s more appealing to little kids and Disney adults than to the average park goer. In Japan, not only was themed headgear more common, but it was somehow more over the top as well. In place of headbands were plush headpieces that engulfed the head almost entirely (like this Boo). And the commitment didn’t stop there – countless park goers dressed in matching outfits or costumes; entire groups thematically coordinated. Incidentally, we were in Universal on the vernal equinox, so there were swaths of schoolchildren all over; and despite having no school that day, many were dressed in their school uniforms (kids wearing their school uniforms on their day off? Willingly??). The people-watching experience really tempered any agitation about the long lines.

One of my favorite moments was realizing that both Tokyo DisneySea and Universal Studios Japan were home to little New Yorks. In fact, New York in Universal is where I found one of the only vegetarian meals available in the park: a good old fashioned slice of New York pizza… which included a side of fries (sure, why not? Sounds American to me). I have no shame in admitting that I feel very proud to live in a place that is so widely beloved and mimicked, and I was feeling oh-so-smug as I walked through Fake Central Park with my real Central Park members hat on.

Lastly, the theme parks didn’t strictly limit themselves to Universal and Disney theming. In DisneySea, there was a whole section of merchandise dedicated to characters that had been created for the park. They were not Disney characters, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t popular Japanese characters either. They were just cute little animal creatures with cute names and cute little backstories. In Universal, intermixed with all of the movie-themed rides, there were several anime overlays – a 3-D Jujutsu Kaisen experience, a Doraemon virtual reality ride, and a Spy X Family “top secret mission” / puzzle-based scavenger hunt. This of course meant plenty of anime merchandise as well, and you best believe I bought some Spy X Family goodies. When in Japan!

Recommendations:

• If you like theme parks, don’t overlook Japan’s.
• If you’re going to Universal Studios Japan, make sure you’ve checked for the latest guidance around entry to the more popular sections of the park. In order to get into Super Nintendo World, we had to reserve a spot in the virtual queue once we were in the park. Since we didn’t realize this until about a half hour after park opening, we couldn’t enter Super Nintendo World until close to 6pm.
• Join in on the fun and coordinate outfits with your group! My friends and I didn’t do this, but it would’ve enhanced the experience for sure.

Shopping

Shopping malls in Japan are EXPANSIVE. And shopping in general is prolific. We’d land in metro stations in central areas and struggle to find the exit because we were funneled directly into shopping labyrinths like retail lab rats. Where New York stretches its shops down the lengths of avenues and in newer multi story shopping centers like The Shops at Hudson Yards and the Oculus, Japan does all of that and so much more. Malls with 10+ floors featuring hundreds of shops, many floors thematically categorized (anime, crafts, skincare, jewelry, etc.). And because multiple megamalls aren’t enough, you also have several indoor/outdoor shopping districts to choose from. It felt economically implausible that so many shops could exist in a single city – how is there enough demand for such a massive supply?

Despite my incredulity, and my tendency towards frugality, the shopping in Japan was a highlight for sure. There’s just so much to see, so many well designed products to appreciate, so many kawaii plushies and toys to “aww” at, so many fashionable shoppers to admire along the way. Plus, the abundance of large shopping centers didn’t come at the expense of smaller, mom-and-pop shops, specialized artisan vendors, and secondhand stores. Probably half of my non-food purchases in Japan were thrifted, and I must say I found some gems. Altogether, shopping in Japan is a world unto itself.

Recommendations:

• Eat and be merry as you shop around the ~150 year old Kuromon Ichiba Market in Osaka. Not enough shopping, you say? Head over to Osaka’s main shopping district Shinsaibashi-suji and grab some food from an exceedingly brightly advertised restaurant in Dotonbori. Don’t forget to take a picture with (or take a picture of all the people taking a picture with) the Glico man.
• Shop big and tall at the towering shopping centers in Shibuya and/or in Ginza in Tokyo.
• Visit Akihabara in Tokyo for gamer/anime-centric shopping.
• Support local artisans at the Hakone Craft House.
• Allocate ample time to explore the cute shops and delicious treats lining Arashiyama Village.
• Don’t snub Family Mart, 7-Eleven, and Lawson. They are the ultimate convenience and they deserve our gratitude.

Public amenities

The public amenities in Japan put those in the U.S. to shame. When I say “public amenities”, I’m mainly thinking of three things: (1) public transit, (2) public restrooms, and (3) vending machines. You already heard my spiel on public transit between cities, but it’s equally fantastic within cities. Trains and buses run on time, everything is spotless, and not once did we experience a disruption of the peace – a high contrast to NYC’s subway system, where delays are prolific, litter or spilled drinks are a common blight, and panhandling and reports of harassment or violence are all too frequent. The grass looks much greener on the other side, though Japan’s transit does have its own symptoms of a less green history, like the women-only cars that were instituted in 2005 as a result of reports of sexual harassment (a fact which would come to a shock to no woman anywhere).

Train stations were largely well equipped with the other 2 amenities: public restrooms and vending machines. Public restrooms in Japan were abundant, easy to find – not exclusively in train stations – they were clean(!!), and best of all, most toilets had bidet attachments that played white noise when you sat down. It endowed a sense of privacy I’d never experienced in a public restroom. Altogether, the public restrooms in Japan were a far cry from the pay-to-pee restrooms of Europe.

I wouldn’t have expected vending machines to be worth commenting on, but I really came to cherish them. Maybe what did it for me was the variety of items you could get, including hot drinks (ok, when I say “hot drinks” I really just mean hot chocolate), and an array of snack and meal items, all of which come at reasonable prices. What’s more, vending machines were everywhere. I’d come to expect them in all of the train stations, but I eventually learned there’s no wrong spot to situate a vending machine. I took full advantage and made mini adventures out of trying vending machine drinks without translating the labels, basing my choice on the design. It was an invigorating time. Fun fact: There’s about 1 vending machine for every 23 people in Japan!!

Culture of cuteness

I expected some baseline level of cuteness from the country that originated kawaii, but it out-cuted those expectations with a cuteness that pervaded everything. Even the anti-pedophile signs posted in train stations and on telephone poles had a cute, cartoonish design. And the subway ads blew New York’s out of the water with their hand-drawn style; I could almost be convinced to buy whatever it is they're selling.

One of the most pervasive and joyful artifacts of the culture of cuteness was the gachapon machines that dominated the sidewalks, malls, and train stations, particularly in Osaka and Tokyo. For the uninitiated, like myself a mere 6 months ago, gachapons are magical little toy vending machines that dispense 1 item from a selection of 4-6 themed toys. The toys are often miniature versions of foods, household items, or anime and video game characters, among many possibilities, and generally aren’t functional. They usually cost between 200 and 600 ¥ (about 1-4 USD) and they come in tiny plastic containers that are faithfully recycled in little baskets near the machines. We have similar toy dispensers in the US, but gachas were entirely quirkier, infinitely more common, and oh so thrilling to open. As someone who generally feels like a kid in an adult’s body – and who doesn’t? Except those who’re kidding themselves – these machines absolutely fed into my childish excitement and love of surprises, however trivial. One of my favorites was a keychain that now decorates my kitchen cabinet handle: it’s an itty bitty fruit danish with a teeny tiny pair of tongs and it’s just precious.

Recommendations:

• Get at least one gachapon after giving yourself ample time to appreciate and consider all the options.

What else…

There’s so much more I could say about my time in Japan, but at some point I need to wrap this up and you’re probably ready to be done reading if you’ve made it this far. I want to share a few more observations and takeaways that didn’t really fit with my categories above but were of note:

• At chain restaurants, they tend to have English menus, even if the staff don't necessarily speak English.
• Mask wearing is the norm.
• Shiba inus are not very friendly dogs and the shiba cafe was not worthwhile.
• Heated toilet seats are fantastic.
• If you pay attention, you might find English gibberish on Japanese clothing.
  

Wrapping up

6 months after my time in Japan, I miss the stunning landscapes and the kindhearted strangers. I find myself jealous of my friends who have an autumnal trip to Japan around the corner; they’ll get to see Hakone in the fall! Oh how I would love to teleport right now to an onsen amidst mountains and changing leaves. I miss Japan so, and I consider myself immensely fortunate to have had the time I did there, with such a wonderful travel crew.

My 2 weeks in Japan reminded me how slowly time moves when you find yourself constantly exposed to new places and new experiences. New York City offers me opportunities to experience novelty every day, and I almost feel like I can extend my life by feeding my curiosity, seeking change, noticing the details of daily life even when I’m home in this familiar city.

If you’re venturing to Japan, I wish you a wonderful, delicious, adorable, heartwarming, awe-inspiring trip. While I hope you’ll welcome my recommendations, I also hope you'll embrace a sense of adventure and spontaneity, letting whimsy take the reins. Walk around the city, go for a hike, hang out in a park, eat some delicious meals, get some retail therapy, ride the trains, play some crane games. Delight in the marvel of visiting such a beautiful and culturally rich place.

This Earth Day, I graduated from the 12-week online course known as Climate Change: Learning for Action (LFA, for short), hosted by Terra.do. I'd heard about Terra.do and their flagship course through a climate-focused group at Google, and though I couldn't find many reviews online beyond the testimonials on their website, I decided to take the chance and enroll. After all, if I wasn't getting anything out of it in the first few weeks, they'd let me drop out and get my money back.

With the course now behind me, I can see I made the right choice to enroll. I write this review now to help you, good people of the Internet, to decide for yourselves whether LFA is worth your time. Though I'll lightly touch on the course contents, the main focus of this review isn't on the LFA syllabus, since that information can be found on the Terra.do website. Rather, I write about:

1. Who the course might be suited for
2. What the course did well
3. What could’ve been better
4. The key benefits, to me

P.S. If you decide to enroll in LFA, you can get a 20% discount (or so they tell me) by using this referral link.

Rewind: Where my climate journey began

Environmentalism and climate activism have been important to me ever since I learned about the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest in 3rd grade. As a child, I was so moved by what we had done in class that I decided to fundraise by organizing mini "festivals" for my family members and charging them an equally mini fee to play festival games I'd built myself. All of the proceeds of my games would be stored in a fund my parents managed (probably a bunch of coins in a drawer somewhere) and eventually donated towards the conservation of the Amazon Rainforest.

After the festival-organizing days of my childhood, I wasn't a particularly active friend to the environment. I made some eco-friendly personal choices after college, like becoming vegetarian in 2020, making donations to climate-focused nonprofits, and educating myself ad-hoc with books and podcasts (see Drawdown, Eating Animals, and How to Save a Planet). I also got a job at Google, a company with a relatively ambitious sustainability plan. Still, it didn't feel like much; certainly not enough. Looking at climate-induced destruction across the world, from wildfires to mudslides, hurricanes to droughts,  I felt an increasingly urgent compulsion to do more.

I enrolled in Terra.do's LFA to start figuring out what "doing more" should look like for me. I hoped that, by gaining a more comprehensive understanding of climate change and existing solutions, I might prepare myself to become a more impactful change agent. At the very least, I would learn more about the state of climate change and build a network for a potential future in climate work. As you'll see, my hopes were well met overall.

Who LFA is suited for

All of the students in my cohort shared a couple things in common: We all had at least a basic understanding of climate change, and we were willing to invest time each week into learning more. Beyond that, it's tough to generalize across who LFA is made for. Frankly, the diversity of goals and backgrounds was impressive. Broadly speaking, the people in my cohort came into the course with one or two of the following goals:

1. transitioning to a new job in climate,
2. bringing a climate lens to a current job, and/or
3. pursuing climate action outside of work.

While a majority of students committed the 10+ hours a week needed to earn the course certificate, some had more time to dive deeper into each class and to attend all of the guest lectures, while others spent only as much time as they could spare. In this way, the course is well suited to anyone who is eager to learn and willing to spare some time. If you don't care about earning a certificate, you have all the time in the world; the course materials are available to students indefinitely after the course ends, so there's always time to revisit class slides or view recordings.

Even more seasoned climate activists seemed to get something out of the course, whether through meaningful interactions with other students in lab discussions and in the Terra.do Slack workspace, or by gaining a more holistic view of climate challenges and potential solutions through classes and guest speaker engagements. The class materials might have presented redundant information to some, but those materials were just a piece of the overall value pie 🥧.

The course is especially well suited to those, like me, who learn well within a structure. Particularly, a structure with lots of optional tangents and deep dives. Plenty of the resources and information shared in LFA could be found online, but Terra.do does the difficult task of curating the information within a cohesive picture, and distilling some of the more convoluted topics into something more easily understood. Further, the assignments and lab discussions built in a level of accountability and helped to make the new information sticky.

What LFA did right

Especially considering Terra.do has only been around since 2020, they got a lot right with this course. They may even achieve their mission of getting 100 million people to work on solving climate change by 2030, if we can account for the butterfly effect their teachings will have.

Class materials 📕

The bread and butter of LFA was the classes – 20 in total, designed as slideshows built into the course portal, each taking a couple hours on average to complete. The classes are well designed to keep your attention. Visually, they make the information easy to digest, and they include a variety of content types: a mix of text slides, videos, links to external studies and articles, quizzes, and visuals (including a much-appreciated cute animal pic at the end of each class 🦦). For time-constrained students, they do a great job of delineating between external links that are required reading vs. optional side quests.

A huge plus here is that the class materials are updated frequently. As the climate space is ever changing, and our understanding of climate science continues to grow, the course creators keep up. As an example, I was in the middle of LFA when a new IPCC report dropped (IPCC AR6 WGII). Not only did we discuss its findings in our lab discussion and over Slack, but it was also referenced in the next week's class slides. Terra.do isn't messing around.

Assignments 📝

Over the course of the 12 weeks, there were 5 assignments – 2 group assignments, 3 individual. I found this to be just the right number, and the right balance between collaboration and individual work. Further, I thought each assignment was well constructed to thoughtfully engage students while allowing for flexibility in direction. In particular, the individual assignments were designed to accommodate students' different goals for the course. Depending on what you came to LFA to achieve, you could choose a path within the assignment that aligned with those goals. The assignments challenged me to think about what impact I could have on climate, how specifically I might start to achieve that impact, and what difficulties I might need to overcome in order to succeed. In this way, the assignments were also pivotal offsets to the information overload from some of the classes. The prompts helped me to focus my attention, process the information I'd learned up to that point, and verbalize a plan for how I could apply that information in the form of action.

The assignments were helpful in and of themselves, but instructors also provided useful comment feedback on each assignment. It offered great food for further thought, and helped me to address flaws in the ways I'd been framing some problems. My instructor's feedback was thoughtful and showed that she gave my assignments due consideration, challenging me further without detracting from the value of my work.

Here is an example assignment submission to give you an idea of the sort of challenges involved: Assignment 1: It's 2040 and we solved climate change. This first assignment was the broadest of them, and more of a visioning exercise. Many of the later assignments were more research-focused, and a bit more narrowly defined.

Labs 🧪

Every LFA cohort is divided into multiple groups which meets for a 90-minute lab every week (or 60 minutes, if that's all you're able to commit time towards). Multiple lab groups were created to accommodate availabilities, which students had sent prior to the start of the course, to ensure that everyone would be assigned to a lab that worked for their schedule. Labs were also recorded and shared for later viewing, in case students couldn't attend their session in a given week.

The quality of the lab depended in part on the instructor – each lab group was led by a different person, with varying levels of teaching experience and different backgrounds working on climate. My instructor was incredibly kind and knowledgable, and facilitated discussions well, though she was less experienced with teaching and her class recaps weren't the most engaging.

What I found to be the most valuable component of the lab were the guided discussions and breakout rooms to dive deeper into class materials and current events. It was encouraging and inspiring to engage with and hear from a group of people that could empathize with climate anxieties, share in celebrations of climate wins, and together analyze different aspects of climate change. Further, because the members of the lab group were geographically spread out, the discussions would take on a global context, where each student could contribute information from their local climate situation.

Diversity of the cohort 🌏

Speaking of geographically spread out students, one of my favorite aspects of the course was the diversity of the cohort. Not only did students represent countries all over the globe, but their career/life backgrounds were greatly varied. At the start of the course, students were invited to introduce themselves over Slack, making it clear just how many different areas of expertise and interests were embodied by the cohort. Altogether, it made for some especially interesting discussions, a wider scope of perspectives, and more variation in resources that were shared amongst the group.

The diversity of the cohort also affirmed my suspicion that this would be a great network to have access to for a potential future in climate work. Between my cohort and previous ones still present in the Slack community (not to mention all the cohorts to come), all the bases are covered by Terra.do fellows. And when you're not sure who to talk to for a specific need, the Slack community as well as the Terra.do course instructors are immensely helpful in making connections. If I have climate-related questions or project ideas in the future, I feel confident that the Terra.do community would be a great help to me.

Guest speakers 🗣

About once a week, Terra.do invites a guest speaker to give an hour-long climate talk (or "keynote lecture") to the current LFA cohort, usually open to other Terra.do community members as well. It isn't required to attend all guest talks in order to earn the course completion certificate, but they were such interesting guests that I wanted to attend most talks anyway. To make the talks more engaging, the last 15 minutes or so were typically dedicated to answering student-submitted questions.

The speakers were consistently well-selected, each one having done fascinating work in climate. Not all of the talks stuck with me, but one that stood out was by Dr. Chip Fletcher. It was a bit of a reckoning for many of us, I think; just the right balance of annihilating our hope for the future and then giving some of that hope back to us, with an added sense of obligation. You can watch that talk on Youtube – I highly recommend it. Some of the other guest speakers included Tony Lent, the Co-Founder of Capital4Climate, Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, and Dr. Saleemul Huq, renowned scientist and COP negotiator.

Course portal 💻

Terra.do LFA classes, assignments, calendars, and additional resources are consolidated in a single portal. While there were some areas for improvement I'll mention later, for the most part the portal was an immensely useful course companion which made it simple to track my progress and access course content.

Quick caveat: Terra.do is planning to release an app soon, which may replace or at least supplement some of the functionality of the current course portal.

Receiving feedback ‍👂

Just as they delivered great feedback on my assignments, Terra.do is great at encouraging and receiving feedback from students. They take feedback very seriously, and it shows in how sophisticated and well-organized the course is despite being less than 2 years old. Every class ends with a brief [optional] survey, and every slide contains a feedback link for thoughts or suggestions that come up along the way. They also send out an end-of-course survey to improve for future cohorts.

For what it's worth, I got confirmation that they actually act on feedback when, after I submitted slide-specific feedback, one of the instructors reached out to me to thank me for the feedback, add some clarity, and assure me that they would update the slides for the next cohort. Most of the feedback is anonymous, so they wouldn't reach out to you directly, but this just goes to show you that they do indeed take feedback very seriously.

Continued learning 📚

I mentioned it earlier, but it's worth reiterating here: the class materials remain accessible to students even after the course ends, meaning you can note down materials you want to return to and circle back to them as time allows.

There's also endless room for continued learning with the support of the Terra.do Slack community. There are channels for topic-specific discussions, for local Terra communities to arrange meetups, for sharing climate wins, for posting climate-related job openings, and more! There is always something new to learn from the amazing Terra.do community.

What could've been better

If you've read up to this point, you can tell I found Terra.do's LFA quite valuable and well worth the investment on the whole. Still, the course is in its infancy and not without flaws. I wouldn't call any of these flaws dealbreakers. In fact, some of them just felt like necessary tradeoffs for a course like this – more struggle than flaw, perhaps. In any case, here are some of the less rewarding challenges I ran into through the course:

1. Information overload. 🤯 The classes were so full of information, and so many possible deep dives, I found it hard to pick and choose what to pursue and what to put off for later. Further, I found it hard to know how to act in response to the information – there isn't necessarily a "call to action" for a lot of the problems the classes pose, even though we all enrolled because we would like to help. When there are so many issues within climate change, and so many potential solutions, you can feel helpless as you read about them, wondering if this particular problem or solution is something you should devote any time towards (and if you decided to devote the time, where would you start??).
   
   On the other hand, I really appreciated the breadth of the course and that it established a baseline understanding across the board so I could pick and choose where to dive deeper. After all, the course intends to impart an understanding of climate change so that students can then decide how to become an advocate with that knowledge. There's a huge challenge in navigating the state of climate change, and Terra.do did well at organizing the information into something that could be acted upon, even if it rendered me overloaded with information at times.
2. Message overload. Just as there was some information overload in the courses, I found there to be too much activity to keep up with in the Slack community. There are so many channels you can join depending on your interests, in addition to the more general channels and the cohort- or lab-group-specific channels. Even being selective about which special-interest channels I joined, I found myself quickly falling behind in every channel. New threads were started and resources shared seemingly constantly. With the ever-growing Terra.do community, I expect this will only become a more congested space, diminishing the utility of the resources by giving community members decision paralysis.
   
   Thankfully, there are already some efforts in place to help with this, with more on the way. First, Terra.do leaders put guidelines into place for Slack use to minimize disorganization. Second, leaders send out email digests, which help to consolidate highlights. This includes overall Terra.do community announcements and key resources, as well as lab group-specific announcements sent by your instructor. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, Terra.do is preparing to release a new app which, among other purposes, is meant to improve course communications and ultimately replace Slack for community messaging.
3. Course portal UX. Nothing about the portal was horrible, just mildly painful at times. For one, the group assignments were somewhat challenging to collaborate on within the portal. I found the UX to be a bit too simple for collaborative purposes, and instead opted to use a separate Google Doc that would make it easier to do things like make concurrent edits and leave comments on collaborators' work. In the same vein, the course portal did not provide a super intuitive or advanced way to take notes, and so again I found myself using an external doc instead. Not at all a dealbreaker, but a minor frustration.

Key benefits

If I had to summarize the primary benefits Terra.do: Learning for Action provided to me, it would be these:

1. A stronger understanding of climate science, the various complications of the climate problem, and the potential solutions from a political, economic, technical, and behavioral perspective.
2. Some mixed feelings about our ability as a society to overcome the challenges ahead, particularly in light of the political response I've seen in the U.S. to climate proposals.
3. A diverse network of inspiring, knowledgable, climate-conscious people.
4. A plan for myself as an agent of climate action.

I'm eager to continue on my climate journey, and I attribute a lot of that to Terra.do. Despite my mixed feelings about our ability to avoid the worst of climate change, I feel better equipped to do my part, and I consider that a win. I have a long way to go, but I'm a lot further than where I started.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley

Additional Resources

Highlights of resources shared in LFA

LFA introduced me to some pretty awesome websites and YouTube channels that I'd love to share with you. Whether you want to understand what sort of resources LFA references, or just want to dip your toes into climate education before committing more fully, here is a [very tiny, somewhat scattered] subset of resources shared in LFA:

• [YouTube] The latest IPCC report explained by ClimateAdam
• [YouTube] Green New Deal explained by Vox
• [YouTube] Doughnut Economics explained by BBC Reel
• [Carbon Brief] Q&A: How Do Climate Models Work?
• [Carbon Brief] Analysis: How ‘carbon-cycle feedbacks’ could make global warming worse
• [Grist] Discount rates: A boring thing you should know about (with otters!)
• [Climate Interactive] The En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator
• [Science Direct] Enabling a circular economy for chemicals in plastics
• [The Nib] Are Your Carbon Offsets Doing Anything?

Free money

In case you missed it, note that you can get a 20% discount (so I'm told) by using this referral link.

Oh, how I've longed for you, Google office. The fresh-cooked meals and snacks for days. The decidedly long hallways made shorter by scooters planted at each main intersection. The distinct absence of the bed staring over my shoulder, as it liked to do while I worked in my itsy bitsy studio apartment. The people! Oh, people. People greeting me as I walk into the building, people avoiding eye contact with me in long hallways, people taking their time wrapping up meetings in the room I need. That's what I've been missing!

While I was never at the office as an employee, I got a small taste of it in my first interview way back in 2019. So in a sense, it's true that I am returning to office. And yet, it's so shiny and new. Coming in to the office as an employee has made me feel like a kid in a candy store; or, even better, a kid in Disney World, where it's so easy to get lost but when it happens it doesn't matter because everyone is nice and there's magic waiting around every corner. I am elated to be going into the office, most importantly for the productivity I've gained by working from an office environment... Just kidding, the most important thing is the free food, which, in all likelihood, has also increased my productivity by way of nutritional and motivational value (very sneaky, Google). It seems the majority of NYC-based employees are taking advantage of the voluntary WFH period, but the benefits of working from the office have been too great for me to forgo.

Google-style Return-to-Office (RTO) has been an enormous mood booster and I'm eager to share all the amazing, Googley experiences I've had in office. However, while returning to office has been a net positive, it's not without its down sides. I'll elaborate on those first, so we can end on the good stuff. Just you wait (just you wait).

RTO Pains

"Pain" is a strong word considering the immense privilege it is to get to go into the Google office. Most of the downsides are minor or fleeting, and to me they are easily outweighed by the upsides. Nevertheless, here they are:

1. COVID risks

While every employee is required to be vaccinated before coming into the office, that hasn't prevented cases from appearing. Just last week, someone on my floor who I'd had a conversation with in one of the microkitchens messaged me to let me know they tested positive. Thankfully, it was a short and socially distanced conversation, and the tests I've taken since have come back negative. Still, it's a firm reminder that, even with the vaccination requirement, being in the office presents more risk of exposure than not. I'm lucky to be in a corner of the office where there is little through traffic and only a few people are working [very far apart from one another], so the risk is considerably small. Even so, voluntarily coming to the office means consenting to the risks of being indoors with other people during a pandemic.

2. Lunchtime loneliness

In the first month or two of RTO, it was more often than not the case that I was the only person on my team who decided to come into the office. At first, this didn't bother me much, both because I was riding the highs of being in the office for the first time as an employee, and because I was one of only a few people who were back in the office, before everyone was even allowed to return (initial RTO happened in waves based on team and org).

However, as more teams started to be allowed back in office, I was seeing other people reunite with their teams, while I was still the only person on my team in-office. In the face of other teams' grand reunions and delighted conversations over team lunches, I felt an intense psychological loneliness. I get along with my team well, and I find plenty of ways to connect with them virtually, but seeing other teams gather joyfully in person, while I sat alone, was a heavy emotional weight. It was the first time in years that I'd felt like a middle schooler at lunch with no one to sit with. I'd set up the occasional lunch with people I knew from NYU, or another team I just happened to meet on my floor, but my introversion rendered these lunches infrequent. Plus, all the normal avenues Google provides for teamless, introverted Googlers like me to meet up for lunch ("lunch ninja", for one) weren't in operation because of COVID.

In the end, a couple teammates did start to come in more regularly and heroically saved me from my loneliness. More on that in a bit.

3. Commute

Considering I live 25 minutes from the office, including a short subway ride with no transfers, my commute really isn't bad. I have teammates who would be coming from deep in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, so I'm fine. I could even skew this as a positive by pointing out that it's psychologically useful to have a commute to delineate the start and end of my work day. On the other hand, the NYC subway needs help and rush hour should calm down.

4. Peer pressure

This isn't peer pressure in the "double dog dare" sense, but rather an implicit pressure by nature of being around colleagues. At home, there are no eyes on me (I hope... 👀). In the office, there's a constant vague awareness that anything you do can be observed by other people. If I take a break to check my personal email, or I go for a second dessert, or I step out of the office to go for a walk, those are all things that my teammates or floormates can see. Realistically, I know they don't care, and if anything they're glad because they'll feel safer to do the same and get that second dessert themselves.

I suspect there's some amount of creeping anxiety that comes with being around others in an office, away from the solitary safety of a home. And it probably says something about my self-consciousness that I would at all be negatively affected by the mere presence of other people as I work. Still, it's something I've noticed about being back in office, and something I might not have noticed had I never worked from home alone (or with family/friends) for so long.

5. Noise

Some people talk out loud when they run into a problem they're working on alone. It's fine, that's how they work out a problem. I'm not one to interrupt their process when instead I have the easy solution of putting on my noise-cancelling headphones.

I had forgotten, as well, that not wearing headphones can be a signal to officemates that I am open to conversation. 9 out of 10 times, I'm not.

There's also the openness of Google NYC's floor plan, which encourages collaboration and a sense of team-hood, but also inevitably leads to sudden loud conversations that echo through the space.

Small problems, easy solution. Somewhat hypocritical of me, too, given that I've committed most of these offenses. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

RTO Pleasures

With the RTO "pains" out of the way, on to the good stuff!

1. Food

It's already been said, but it deserves all the attention it gets. For a foodie like me, the "free" (included in my compensation) food is the ultimate treat. It's like being on a college dining plan, except that the food is consistently great and I didn't have to pay a ridiculous amount to access it. The diversity of options and the consistently high quality bar across them is just absurd, it fills me with excitement every day for breakfast and lunch. Because only a fraction of NYC-based Googlers are going into the office, not all of the cafés have reopened, but so far 4 have opened for breakfast and/or lunch. Each of those cafés has a barista bar, where you can find talented latte artists.

Beyond the cafés, there are the beloved microkitchens, which are more commonly referred to as MKs (this is also an acronym for the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. Coincidence? I think not.). Don't be fooled, these are not tiny kitchens. Especially not on the scale of New York City apartment kitchens. Each has a massive industrial refrigerator the size of 3 regular refrigerators, stocked with flavored waters, seltzers, sodas, cold brew, cheese sticks, carrots, yogurt, milk, and most recently, apple cider and eggnog 🎄. Outside of that, there are plenty of snacks, fresh fruits, cereals, and chocolates on rotation, and an espresso bar for those coffee connoisseurs who prefer to make their own rather than go to one of the café barista bars.

I could go on about my favorite foods I've had at Google, but I'll spare you and share these pictures instead:

2. Teammates & other employees

In the last month or so, a teammate has joined me in consistently coming into the office, and we're occasionally joined by one or two other teammates. For a team of 20+, this isn't many, but it's infinitely better than the first month and a half of being the only one coming in. I have people to eat lunch with now (squeals with middle schooler excitement)! People to share in the joy of exploring the office! People to join me in trips to the microkitchen for all the snacks! People to chat about work problems with, or about completely unrelated topics that imbue a sense of camaraderie to a team which, despite our best efforts, has mostly felt distant for the last year and a half! I really enjoy spending time with my teammates, and it's unsurprisingly better and more emotionally satiating when that time is spent together in person. Sure, it's distracting sometimes, but the overall benefits to my mental wellbeing far outweigh the costs of distraction. Besides, I have a lot of team bonding to make up for given how the pandemic deprived me of these opportunities.

Even smaller interactions – with cafe staff, security team members, random people in passing – add positivity to the day. I had this sort of interaction to some degree while working from home (with my building staff, for example), but I was mostly in my apartment all by my lonesome. It's easier for me, now, to feel like I'm a part of something, just by nature of daily micro-interactions (MIs?) with fellow Googlers.

3. Amenities

Because the free food wasn't spoilage enough, there's also a gym, massage therapists, a game room, a doctor's office, and probably other things I've yet to discover. As of last week, I've officially taken advantage of all of these amenities (thank you, onsite COVID testing).

The massage therapists come at a cost, but it's highly discounted, and Googlers earn "massage points" on a recurring basis which they can use to pay for massage minutes. I've gotten one massage so far, focusing on my back, and the masseuse told me after she finished, "You've... you've really got something there. But it's fixable!" Clearly, I'd better return for more massages.

4. Views

5. Office space

And finally, not even accounting for the views, the cafés, and the amenities, the office space is so wonderfully designed. There are parts that may be a bit too wide open for my liking (thankfully, my desk is not in one of those parts), but one of the beautiful things about the office is that there are so many awesome spaces to work from, or to just relax in.

I've only photo-captured a fraction of these spaces, and there are many I still haven't even explored. I just went to a whole new floor last week! And I forgot to take a picture of my favorite microkitchen, which is a lodge-like space invoking cozy winter vibes, fireplace included.

Each floor is themed differently, which generally plays into the interior design and the names given to the meeting rooms. Half of my floor is themed around science fiction, which led to meeting room names including "Space Invaders", "Red Shirt", "Lord Dark Helmet", "Danger, Will Robinson!", and "Forty-Two".

Not geeky enough? How about the fact that they put a "Platform 9 ¾" on the platform 3/4 of the way up between the 9th floor and the 10th floor?

It's just right.

The Future of RTO

It's unclear what RTO will look like for Google offices in general, let alone Google NYC. It sounds like the WFH option will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, which, sadly, means I may go a while longer without meeting most of my teammates in person. At the same time, it's more comfortable to take this transition slowly, both in terms of feeling like the COVID risk is minimized, and in terms of personally adjusting to a fully populated office environment and all the noise and distraction that entails.

For now, I'll continue to enjoy my time in the office, so long as I'm allowed to be there. It's been a mental and emotional haven for me, and I'm still slightly in awe that I get to take advantage of all these wonderful benefits. I'm cognizant of the fact that they'll make it harder to one day leave Google, but I'll keep that thought in the back of my head while I revel in the pleasures of being at Google NYC.

From August 13 through September 11, I traveled to 6 different cities across Europe and didn’t take a single vacation day. With Google’s 4-week work-from-anywhere policy, I considered this trip a proof-of-concept on future non-vacation travels, and I’m pleased to say it proved to be an overall success. And how could it not be? Even if work had been a struggle, I visited 6 cities, 5 of them new to me! That’s a success by itself. Thankfully, work was on average the same amount of struggle that it normally is, which is a variable but ultimately manageable amount of struggle. Here’s what I learned about the experience of working while traveling.

Where in the world you work matters less than the space you work in

Previously I’d been working alone in a 400 sq. ft. studio apartment, 10 steps away from my bed and my kitchen. I’m not the sort of person who’s tempted by my bed in the middle of the workday, but there’s something to be said for having work and relaxation physically separated. A studio apartment leaves very little literal space for compartmentalization. In Madrid, I didn’t have a particularly large space, but I did have a bedroom that was separate from the dining room table where I did the majority of my work, and even had a third space (a glorified closet with a desk inside) to take calls from. I’m drawing causality from correlation here, but I think having a workspace that was separate both from the bedroom and the kitchen made a positive difference in my physical and mental wellbeing and, as a consequence, my productivity.

Where in the world you work matters less than who you work alongside

More than the ability to better mentally compartmentalize thanks to a physically separated work space, the [more] ideal work atmosphere was made possible by the presence of my college roommate with whom I was staying in Madrid. She’s arguably a more dedicated and tireless worker than I am, and I naturally fed off of her focus. Working alongside someone makes focusing almost effortless 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the time it’s easier to hold myself accountable and will myself to focus despite the effort.

I think when you’re working in a room with someone who is also working, there are a few factors at play that make it easier to focus: One is the social pressure of focusing; because I value hard work, and I see my friend working hard, I have no excuse not to do the same. On a similar note, working alongside an ambitious individual is inspiring; I strive to be like the hardworking person right in front of me more than I aspire to imitate the distant ideal. A third and still similar reason has to do with the idea,

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?

If I’m alone in my own apartment and the only thing I’m recognized for is what I put out into the ether, all of the other work feels much less meaningful, even if I know it’s building up to the work that will eventually be seen. If someone is watching the process, that same work has meaning. The meaning I find in my work doesn’t even require that my team be the one recognizing what I’m doing; it doesn’t even matter if my friend is paying attention to the fact that I’m working. All that matters is that there’s another human to remind me that the work I’m doing has a recognizable existence beyond myself. It ties into one of the things I’ve struggled most with as a COVID Noogler, which is the absence of in-person interaction, and consequently, in-person recognition. I enjoy getting a “congratulations” or a “well done” over email, chat, or video, but nothing is as concrete as someone looking you in the eyes and recognizing the work you’ve done. As social creatures, it makes sense to me that our brains haven’t yet had time to evolve for virtual interactions to hold as much meaning as in-person ones. It’s not that I feel no sense of accomplishment if I’m working alone, but the meaning is muted by distance and virtuality. After all, what does my work matter if I’m the only witness? Having a work companion turned up the volume of my internal rewards system.

Unexplored territory beckons

Working remotely from a place I’d never been before proved, at times, more distracting than anything because I just wanted to be out exploring. There’s time to explore after work, sure, but not everything is open then, and in my case there was more to explore than I could actually fit into my after-work hours. Never mind that I ended up exploring and re-exploring the same areas…

Though the majority of our time was spent in familiar Madrid, I spent five days solo in unfamiliar Florence. It was a great choice for a wanderluster like me, but I did not go above and beyond in my work that week. My productivity was also challenged because I wasn’t sleeping as well as I might in a place I’m more comfortable in. Even though I felt safe, I think I was naturally on high alert as a solo female (or just a solo human) in a new city where I didn’t speak the language.

Though I had little motivation to go above and beyond, I was highly motivated to finish what I needed to finish quickly so that I could go out and explore. I think if I’d been staying for more than five days, it would have been easier to convince myself to delay the gratification of exploration. Note to self for future work & travel trips: Still go to the new cities you haven’t been to before, but stay for longer than a week.

Early time zones can be a gift

Working from another time zone was actually great. I don’t think this would’ve been as delightful in a timezone 6 hours behind New York, but 6 hours ahead of my team gave me 6 hours of peace before I started to see my inbox filling up. Mondays in Madrid treated me gently, giving me space to warm up to my work and plan my day before nudging me towards anything in particular. Though, it wasn’t all so pleasant. I might’ve had a head start in the race, but the next day I’d be reminded that this is a multi-day race, and all the time I spent resting yesterday was time that my team spent catching up to me. Still, that 6 hour window while my team was sleeping gave me enough time to follow up on my 18-hour backlog of emails and get done a good chunk of whatever else I needed to do before the rest of my team was online and meetings were a thing again.

That said, I did have to take a couple late-night calls with my Seattle-based external partners. Even this was so worth the value gained from missing the window for their emails on the day they were sent. It’s like magic: seeing the email in your inbox 15 hours after it was sent conjures only a fraction of the stress I would feel seeing it 5 minutes after it was sent. By the time I saw the email, I knew the sender was off in dreamland and I had at least 9 hours before they’d even be thinking about whatever it was they’d sent. The delay allows for a much more relaxed perspective in processing the all-important external emails, a perspective which I mostly fail to remember (or fail to enforce) when I’m watching the emails come in in real-time.

Not everyone can be so lucky

I realize that I’m incredibly privileged to have a job [and finances] to be able to travel while working. If you’re someone who has the same opportunity and a love of travel, I highly recommend it. While the time zone difference was sometimes a pain, I have no hesitation in declaring that I will do this work/travel thing again. It’s a fun way to sample the "nomad lifestyle" and engage in stimulating cultural immersion without sacrificing vacation days. 10/10 would recommend.

P.S. Consider offsetting the carbon emissions of your travel if you do :)

Starting a new job remotely is hard. I might not be allowed in the office to meet my coworkers in person until next year, and that's hard. What's lost is more than a sense of camaraderie with my colleagues – in fact, I feel I've established that to some degree. More than that, what's lost is the natural osmosis of knowledge that happens when you're surrounded by people who know more than you, talking aloud about what they know, about the noteworthy things that are happening that day, sitting down and debugging a problem together, giving one another encouragement and a sense that the problems you solve have an impact beyond yourself.

Given all the problems I could be grappling with during the pandemic, I have to appreciate that one of my biggest is this sense of my work having limited impact because my coworkers aren't physically present to affirm my struggles and my victories. It forces me to reflect on the meaning inherent to the work itself, and not the pieces of it that would have me collaborating with teammates and finding gratification in the smiles I can put on their faces. I'm focusing more on what sort of work I want to be doing and how I want to go about doing it, less on doing the things that will bring me social acceptance or the things that I believe other people on the team think are important. That's not to say that I'm never given a sense of what's important on my team, or that I don't strive to gain acceptance and connectivity on my team – I do! But because the reward I get from it isn't felt as strongly from a distance, it gives me more space to focus on other things.

This additional space, however, can be problematic for a Noogler who doesn't know what they ought to know, particularly in a role like Developer Relations Engineer, where a majority of the work I'm doing comes from proposals I myself put out there. There are existing, unassigned projects out there for the taking, but the expectation is that I'm going to be proactive in identifying problems with the developer experience and establishing potential solutions to them. That's the role. And that's what I was looking for – this ability to have ownership and to drive a project from ideation to implementation, that's what I want! That's a challenge I yearn for. Even so, the challenge is compounded by the need to establish the knowledge that will enable me to identify problems to solve and to poke holes in my own solution before presenting it to the team for them to poke even more holes. When there is so much to possibly know, it can be demoralizing to feel like I'm tackling this problem in the dark, grabbing onto starting points that may or may not lead me anywhere.

I've realized that I feel particularly gratified lately when the work I'm doing comes from someone else, a Google Ads API partner company, for example; then at least I know the work will have impact. I might not have thought of it on my own, but I know it's important. When I send out that email to the development team at another company, I know that I'm positioned to help solve their problems, and that I get to share responsibility for their victories. At the same time, all this work that comes from others has a constant, underlying, stress-inducing facet which is that, even though their victories are also my victories, their failures are also my failures. I'm not confident yet that I can lead them to victory, at least not without leaning heavily on my teammates (which, thankfully, I have the option to do). For now, avoiding [massive] failures is part of the goal, and I'm not typically someone for whom "avoiding failure" is good enough. I want to be able to take risks and feel confident that I am capable and knowledgable enough to turn that risk into reward. Not to mention, I'm not satisfied with the fact that my most rewarding work has been the work that was handed to me; like I said, I yearn to own and to drive projects from ideation to implementation.

All this Noogler uncertainty has had me searching for ways to build my confidence and to inject a sense of self-esteem that will give me fortitude in moments where my work at Google might otherwise suffer from a fear of failure, or from a lack of motivation, or from a sense of not knowing where to begin. For this, I return to painting.

Painting is a comfort. Painting is where I find my flow. I'm not the most imaginative painter, and I struggle to paint in the abstract, but color and light are my strengths. When I was little, I would draw rainbows all the time 🌈, I just loved color and found a simple but unexplainable joy in it. I was thinking about the Doodle for Google prompt this year, which was "I am strong because...", and how my paintings are a reflection of my strength because they represent my patience for the process, my ability to break things down into pieces with an aim on the big picture, and for my propensity towards finding beauty in color. This was what inspired me to embrace my eye for color in my latest painting, which is an ode to the painting process and to color, and the strength I find in them.

I don't paint to distract myself from the frustrations I feel at work. I paint for the sense of control it gives me, for the satisfaction I get from exploring and enhancing the colors found in real life, for the challenge of representing light and form in 2D, for the appreciation it gives me for the work that other artists do, for the forgiving process of painting and painting over and layering until it's just right (or as right as it's going to be). The accomplishment of finishing a painting is enough to reinforce my belief that I am a person of progress; I am energized by making, and I carry that energy into the rest of my life, including my work at Google. Even beyond the painting itself, the satisfaction extends into and fortifies my relationships; when I share my paintings with others, their comments and "likes" remind me of the valuable ties I have, and of my potential to affect and be affected by others even though I haven't been seeing them.

Some people despise the term "work-life balance". In her book, Unapologetically Ambitious, Shellye Archambeau explains that the term is problematic because it represents a false aspiration, that work and life should consume equal energy. To me, work-life balance is not so much about the equality as it is about the ability to manage both without either one making the other infeasible or unenjoyable. Painting, among other things, has been like magic dust to lift the load on the work side of that scale. It hasn't changed the work I have to do, but it has made me stronger and thus the load feels lighter. This is my balance.

6 weeks in to Google, I frequently find myself asking the big question: When will I get to go into the office? While it feels petty to be focused on this question when I should be grateful that I get to work at Google at all (and I am, trust me!), I am all too aware of what I am missing by not having a Google office to go into. Endless snacks and coffee on every floor, free café lunches, scootering around the office, infinite places to work from (including a real desk!), NYC views, not to mention the simple win of making eye contact with someone in person rather than the Google Meet-ified pseudo eye contact I've come to accept in its place. Small vent aside, I am excited to share the experience of my first several weeks of working at Google.

Noogler Onboarding

Though COVID has turned an engaging in-person onboarding experience into a checklist of training sessions and pre-recordings, I must admit that Google's COVID-friendly onboarding has exceeded expectations. Granted, I came in with expectations adjusted for the situation. Of course a big chunk of the culture would be missing, and the natural osmosis of knowledge that takes place in an office space would be harder to come by, and the relationships I would form by walking through the office and grabbing lunch with teammates would instead rely on our ability and willingness to connect over video. Still, it makes me glad that I have joined the company six months into the COVID crisis, and not a week in. Program and team managers have had time to iterate on a fully remote onboarding process, and have taken measures to make Nooglers feel like they are actually a part of the company and not outsiders eking out a place for themselves in this colossus.

The first week was anticlimactic, further lowering the bar. I had received my corporate laptop in the mail a few days prior to my start date, but thanks to resource constraints, I did not yet have my corporate credentials set up, which are required for 99% of the onboarding. This slowdown was not communicated to me until I reached out to ask about it a couple days in, thinking that surely someone would have reached out to me by now if that were the case (they didn't). It was also strange to me that my manager didn't send me a welcome email on my first day (nor my second day, nor my third day...) BUT it turned out that he had, and it went to the corporate email account that I still didn't have access to. Anyhow, I was properly set up early the following week, but Week One was essentially filling out HR documents and finding ways to occupy myself (I found, for instance, a 1,000 piece puzzle!) while I questioned whether they had made a mistake and actually I wasn't going to be working at Google after all. But here I am, six weeks in and with a google.com email address to show for it. Thank goodness.

(Okay, technically I'm seven weeks in, but the first week didn't count.)

General Onboarding and GTI

The first three weeks were a mix of general Google onboarding and an Engineering-specific onboarding program, called "GTI." The general onboarding was what one might expect: a checklist of videos and modules focused primarily on HR and benefits, security and privacy best practices, Google as a business, and Google as a culture. There wasn't anything spectacular about this part of the onboarding, but I give them credit for making it as smooth as possible by building a literal checklist to follow along with. It was sad to watch some of the prerecorded in-person trainings, thinking how different the experience would be in that room vs in my parents' kitchen. But, part of my COVID resilience practice has been to catch myself feeling sad about things like this and remind myself how fortunate I am that:

1. I have parents who will let me stay with them during a pandemic,
2. I have a job where I can work safely from home during a pandemic, and
3. they recorded these in-person sessions so I could experience the closest thing to the real deal.

So, all things considered, the general Noogler onboarding was pretty alright.

GTI, the Eng-specific component, pushed the onboarding experience from an A for Acceptable to an O for Outstanding. The program took up most of those first three weeks. It was a project-driven, team-based program intended to give technical Nooglers hands-on experience with some of the tools and processes that are most prevalent within Google – internal development tools, product and design documents, user experience testing, and accessibility measures, to name a few. Within a cohort of Nooglers with the same start date (my cohort was ~200 large), teams are generally 5-10 people large (mine was on the smaller side at 4) and arranged so that Nooglers in the same time zone are working together. My team was entirely made up of engineers, whereas other teams were a mix of UX Designers, PMs (Product Managers), and Data Scientists, among other roles within Engineering. Being on a team of all engineers was ideal because it lent itself to splitting all of the work evenly, giving us each a taste of everything, rather than giving certain tasks to the person whose role most closely applied (e.g. having PMs write the Product Requirements Document). Each team is assigned a GTI coach, a full-time employee whose role is to offer general guidance, answer ad-hoc questions, and endow Noogler team members with their best tips and tricks for development and other fun Google things. For my team, it was pivotal to have someone who could point us to the tools we needed and who would be available when we found ourselves blocked or plainly confused. In lieu of in-person socializing, it was recommended that we schedule a team "social time" via video conference twice a week. It was sort of awkward at first; I can recall multiple instances of five+ second silences where it was clear we had exhausted our ability to talk about a topic and had no natural segue into another. Even though it felt forced at times, in the end it gave us a chance to bond (and at times commiserate) over our experience onboarding remotely and to develop relationships, albeit temporary, with fellow Nooglers. This social time, as well as interactions with our coach and other teams, further reinforced the notion that all Googlers have that certain "Googliness," despite drastically different backgrounds. I was virtually surrounded by smart, hard-working, curious, friendly people who were collectively struggling to become acquainted with the vastness of Google's internals. Even the guy who had worked at Google before was asking questions!

Scattered throughout GTI were live presentations from subject matter experts across the different areas we were introduced to – accessibility, product, security, developer workflows, user experience, infrastructure, testing, etc. These were typically one to two hour sessions, with a large chunk of that time dedicated to Q+A. Outside of these sessions, I divided my time between meeting with my team for twice-a-day stand-ups, project work – whether that meant coding or contributing to required documents – and studying by reading through internal documentation and completing Codelabs, exercise-based tutorials that introduce engineers to various technologies within Google. By the end of the three weeks, I had some idea of what the core technologies at Google were, what processes I should be aware of, and where I should go if I needed help. Each team wrapped up the three weeks with a brief presentation of their project; in our case, we demoed our chatbot that collected users' ratings of different foods and made recommendations based on average rating. I think the idea was born of our longing for lunch at a real Google café (😭). That behind us, my teammates and I bid one another a very fond farewell, and threw our GTI graduation caps into the air for our Legally Blonde moment.

Onboarding is still ongoing and will be for several months. In fact, there are people who have been here for six+ months who still consider themselves Nooglers – understandably, especially with the overall slowdown of onboarding thanks to the 'rona. So, I will proudly wear my Noogler hat* for as long as it's socially and professionally acceptable. That said, I have only discussed a small piece of my first six weeks up til this point. On to the rest!

The Team

After my first three weeks of GTI and general Noogler onboarding, I finally got to start onboarding onto my team! And what a team it is! I went from being on a team of five people at my last company to a team of eighteen at Google, or forty one if you consider all of Ads Developer Relations (which, in addition to Developer Advocates, includes Technical Writers and Developer Programs Engineers). On that note, allow me to announce my new title... *drumroll please* ... Developer Relations Engineer 🎉. DPEs and DAs have had their career ladders merged, so now I have a title that makes me sound more like an engineer and less like a marketer! Hoozah!

At this point, I have personally spoken with ninety percent of the team, and I am continually amazed at how wonderful everyone is. Part of me worried that by leaving my old job, I was risking leaving a great, tight-knit group of people for a big question mark of a team. I had met a couple team members, but it is hard to gauge the culture of a team without having met them in person or having interacted with a significant portion of them; even then, it may be different from the experience of actually working alongside them (and what does "working alongside" someone even mean when everyone is remote?). The decision to take that risk didn't mean that I was setting a low bar for the team, but rather that I felt comfortable taking the risk because I felt confident that a high bar would be met. Even then, the team has exceeded expectations! Because the role isn't particularly well known or common, people have come into it from all different backgrounds, and they have largely joined Developer Relations out of a desire to help people. That much has been consistently displayed in my last three weeks working with the team; people who I have hardly spoken to and who are presumably very busy with work at the moment have reached out to me to set up time for us to get to know one another, or to offer help should I have any random questions for them. People are going out of their way to make me feel welcome here, to assure me that I belong here, and to preemptively offer their hand in case I feel myself starting to slip. There is a pervasive empathy, on the team and beyond, for the challenges people are facing in and out of work right now, and team members have acknowledged that the onboarding experience is equally affected. Especially as someone who experiences FOMO far more easily than I care to admit, I feel deeply grateful to be on a team that expresses a genuine interest in my being here, even though "here" is in a square on their laptop screen.

Only three weeks in, I have already bonded with team members over Dragon Ball Z references, a passion for great deals, an adoration of Baby Yoda, a love of winning, an interest in Etsy, a desire to see more diversity in tech (and specifically, on my new team), a love of food, and so many other things. And guess what: my team has a Fun Committee and I joined it, so I will be well-positioned to create opportunities for myself and others to continue to connect meaningfully from a distance. The leader of the Fun Committee? Spongebob. These people like Spongebob. These are my people. Oh, and before I stop talking about my team, one more thing: In our team meeting the Friday before Halloween, my manager came dressed up as Batman, mask and all. Just, wow.

Resources on Resources on Resources

There are so many resources I don't know what to do with them. I have been organizing my bookmarks in a way that I hope will be intuitive for my future self, but am already finding myself lost in the immensity of the reference materials and helpful tools at my disposal, and for all I know at this point they will all be relevant. At my last company, I faced the opposite problem – no documentation, broken tooling, and many problems that had never been encountered before. This got better over the course of my few years there, but doesn't compare to the resources available within this massive twenty two year old company. The worst of it (so far) is that there is too much to look through, or a given piece of documentation might be stale – I can work with that!

The internal technical tools are one thing, but there is so much more. I won't go into detail on the technical tooling, but I will at least mention some of my favorite non-technical Google resources I've come across. First is the WFH budget – every Googler is allowed to expense a thousand dollars worth of equipment for working from home during COVID. It has to be something on an approved list of WFH expenses, so I wouldn't be able to spend it on something like exercise equipment or a coffee machine, but I would be able to spend it on a good office chair; in fact, I have! It is in Google's best interest as a business to make sure their employees are equipped to work productively from home, but you could say the same about other companies that do not provide the same luxury. Second is a host of virtual conferences and events that are globally available. So far, I've attended the Women@Google Summit, various NYC Tech Days sessions, participated in a "virtual 5k", tracked my steps for a Google-wide Walktober competition (I placed 317th out of 19,304!), and signed up for virtual art and baking classes – and this is being choosy with my event participation.

Google versus Startup

With the increase in resources comes the tradeoff of more processes and bureaucracy and slowness, which to some is not a fair trade. While I have found it mostly refreshing to have all this time dedicated to my ramping up, some would be frustrated at the inability to simply dive in and immediately push code to production. So far I have not experienced this frustration, though I have found myself bored at times, less as a result of having nothing to do than as a result of having so much to do and feeling like I don't have a cohesive way to do it. I have also seen how some of the processes feel like they could deter the pursuit of internal passion projects. Many projects, even entirely internal ones, would require review by privacy and security teams before they could be used; at a startup, these precautions and processes probably don't exist, and so you are more free to run with any given idea. Again, there are tradeoffs; because there are so many processes and precautions in place, I don't need to worry so much about mistakenly bringing down a production service or accidentally collecting data without proper consent, whereas at a startup, it is infinitely easier to make a fatal mistake.

There are a lot of other comparisons I could draw, but I'll save those for a deeper dive down the line, once I have a more informed view of working at Google. The only other thing I will note for now is the presence of HR. At my last company, we didn't have HR until about a year and a half after I started, and when we did have HR, it was one person. She was wonderful, and her being there made a huge positive difference to the company, but I am seeing now how having an established HR body can make things so much easier. At the same time as it adds requirements that others might find tedious (diversity and inclusion trainings, for instance), a solid HR department provides tools for me to succeed at Google, and helps me to understand what my options are in terms of benefits and career development. More than I expected, I feel personally and professionally supported at Google just by knowing that there exist such well-established people resources.

Looking Ahead

"Don't get emotionally attached to anything here, because as soon as you do they're going to deprecate it and replace it with something else," a teammate warned me recently. There have been a lot of pleasant surprises in the last six weeks, and I count among them the at once alarming and exciting fact of constant change I've heard of here. I consider it a loss if I find myself in a job where I am completely comfortable, so my teammate's warning acts as more of a reassurance that my move to Google need not come at the cost of a likelihood to find myself in situations that compel me to learn and grow. While I have at times been flabbergasted by the breadth of information available to me – within Google at large, but also within my team alone – all the other perks of working here would be in vain without it.

In my last post I speculated that onboarding entirely remotely might allow me to better isolate my enjoyment of the work from my enjoyment of all things that come with working at Google. I cannot speak to the work much yet, given that I am only three weeks in to onboarding onto my team and still in an exclusively absorbent phase. On the "all things Google" side, there is a lot to be said for a team and a company that has found ways to make me feel supported and connected while onboarding remotely through a pandemic. Entirely remote onboarding so far has proven that the possibilities for the next several months out of office should be exciting and joyful at their best, and bearable at their worst. Thinking about the work as I understand it now, I am filled with nerves and wonder, and a desire to build an understanding that will allow me to enjoy the work as much as I have enjoyed everything else. With Spongebob and Batman on my team, I think it will all be just fine.

_{*Actually, I got a Noogler headband}

Interviews and Expectations

"So, I heard you're moving to a non-Engineer role." I heard variations of this comment at least five times in my transition out of my role as a Full Stack Engineer at ActionIQ. It shouldn't bother me so much what other people think of the role I am transitioning into, and yet the discrepancy comes off to me as a violation of my identity as an engineer. As a Developer Advocate (DA), I am required to be an engineer. Only through intimate familiarity with the struggles of a Software Engineer can I adequately communicate with them to understand and amend their issues with the Google API I will represent. It takes an engineer to debug the mysterious exceptions and behaviors that developers find in their code, to help them understand best practices by creating examples and tutorials to guide their development experience, and to recognize and fully comprehend faults or opportunities in the API to then work with Product and Engineering teams to enhance that API for the benefit of the developers who integrate with it.

I lay out these expectations based purely on what I have read online and my conversations with current DAs at Google, but it will be another few months before I can speak confidently from my own experience. Starting on September 14, I will be a DA at Google on the Ads API team. The first few weeks will consist mainly of general Google employee onboarding and engineering-specific onboarding. The following six months or so will have me onboarding into my role and building an understanding of the Ads API so that I can better service the external developers who use it. By the end of that six months, I'm told, I will start to assume responsibility for specific clients – I will internally represent the developer teams at companies that employ the Adwords API and I will become their technical point person on questions and qualms related to the API. We shall see after six months whether reality matches expectations; granted, I am keeping my expectations with a large grain of salt and the overarching expectation that experiences in the DA role vary widely from person to person and team to team. Until I have the experience to verify one way or another, I hope this post will serve to clarify the DA role, including what sort of experience and skill set was necessary to become one.

How Does One DA?

What Ashley McNamara, a DA at Microsoft, describes in her Medium post aligns well with what I have heard from the DAs and recruiters I've spoken with at Google, for the most part. She summarizes the role well,

I like to say that it’s my job to ask dumb questions so you don’t have to, but the real goal of a Developer Advocate is to become the voice of the user. We gather feedback in a way developers can’t (since they know the codebase too well), then use that feedback to shape the product to become what it needs to be.

One caveat to Ashley's post, which might be Google-specific, is that some aspects of the role can be more or less prominent depending on the proclivities and skills of the DA. In this way the role is, as one interviewer told it, a choose-your-own-adventure. That very well may be an exaggeration intended to advertise the role to prospective employees, but it was at least consistent with what everyone else had told me. So, for someone like me who wants to not loathe public speaking and yet never got over my disdain for the experience, the "We’re not afraid of public speaking" header of Ashley's article does not apply. Sure, I am open to the possibility of acclimating to the experience so that I can represent Google more visibly at conferences and community events, but I am hoping to have the option of [and have been led to believe that I will have the option of] limiting my public speaking to smaller, workshop-style settings and panel discussions, rather than solo on-stage presentations. Still, there are other aspects that are inextricably linked to the title, namely the focus on constant learning and a foremost desire to help developers. Developer Advocacy is a relatively new branch within Engineering that exists to serve the relatively new need for an engineer's perspective at the product level of products whose users are engineers, e.g. APIs and client libraries. Thus, a Developer Advocate must be willing to learn continually – about the vast tools and languages that exist in the developer landscape, the problems that developers face in using the API or library, and the intersection of those spaces – to appreciate, represent, and address the engineer's struggle with using the product.

Interviewing for the Developer Advocate role

With expectations laid out and caveated, allow me to add more clarity to the role by detailing my interview process to become a DA at Google.

Attempt #2

So, yeah, this successful attempt was not the only attempt – actually, it was my second time going for a Developer Relations role at Google. The first time was January of 2019, when I interviewed and ultimately was rejected for a Developer Programs Engineer position. The distinction between the two roles is a bit blurry (see this explanation by DA Dustin Ingram), but for the sake of the interview process they are almost identical. The only difference I experienced was that the Developer Advocate interview required an additional step for the onsite, which was a presentation that would showcase my ability to explain and engage an audience around a technical concept of my choosing.

Stepping back a bit, my journey to Google has spanned quite some time, and still less time than what I have heard from others. From what I gather, it is completely normal to interview multiple times for Google before getting hired, sometimes 4 or 5 times (or more)!  Two rounds of on-sites doesn't sound so dreadful in comparison! Starting from my first encounter with the recruiter almost two years ago, I present to you a timeline of my journey to Google:

The Interviews

Out of respect for the process (and because I signed an NDA), I won't go into detail on what exactly was asked in my interviews. But I can share loosely what I felt they were looking for through their interviews:

1. Technical acumen: Part of each interview was what you would expect for any software engineering role: coding. The amount of time dedicated to this piece varied from fifteen minutes to a half hour or so, and the difficulty of the questions varied as much. This felt intended to measure not only my coding ability, but also my general problem solving skills, my ability to think on my feet and adapt to changing requirements, my methodology in approaching a complex problem, my understanding of time and space tradeoffs, and my ability to communicate all of the above clearly. Unlike some technical interviews I have done in the past, coding was not the only piece dedicated to measuring technical know-how. Each interviewer also asked me to explain technical concepts, which showcased both my understanding of the technologies and my ability to communicate that understanding effectively.
2. Communication skills: This is something that the interviewers could gauge throughout the entire interview, whether through a technical or behavioral question. There were a few questions that were more explicitly looking to measure communication (e.g. how would you explain x to y?), but any question was fair game as a representation of how I communicate. After all, how you communicate with an interviewer, even at the beginning and end of the interview when the conversation is more casual, can be taken as a sample of how you would communicate with your coworkers or clients on the job.
3. Interest in the role: I was prepared with several reasons why this particular role and Developer Relations in general was of interest to me, and went into each interview with a list of questions to pull from – both to elicit as much information as possible while I had access to Googlers in the role I was interviewing for, but also to demonstrate that my interest in the role was genuine.
4. Relevant experience: Given how new this sort of role is, I would be shocked if more than 5% of Developer Advocates came from Developer Relations roles prior. Without DevRel experience myself, I leaned heavily into examples that translated clearly into the role, mainly: communicating with clients, writing technical documentation, mentoring coworkers and interns, tutoring Computer Science students, engaging with open source software and OSS communities, and writing code myself for side projects and as a Full Stack engineer.
5. Empathy for developers: By speaking to my Full Stack development experience and clearly articulating how I overcame problems as a developer, and specifically as a developer using tools provided to me by other developers, I proved that I could empathize with the developer experience. For this criteria, it was especially helpful to have thought in advance of examples of times I enjoyed or struggled to use an external piece of software, as well as what could have been useful to overcome those struggles (how could my developer experience have been improved in those instances?)
6. "Googleyness": This is one of those terms you hear but can only guess what it means from the outside. Do they have questions that measure this in isolation? Is it defined anywhere? Did I receive a "Googley" rating? So many questions! The recruiters framed this to me as "culture fit and leadership" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If you know, you know.

This is obviously a limited list, and heavily biased towards my own experience, but I hope it serves to help others prepare for their own Developer Relations interviews, and to clarify what even is required for this type of role. In case it will be helpful for you, here is my resumé at the time I landed a job as a DA at Google:

Notes on COVID-19

While it was strange to have a fully remote interview process this time around, I actually felt as relaxed with my interviewers as I remembered feeling during my on-site in Chelsea. Somehow, that feeling of friendliness and patient support that my interviewers conveyed in my first attempt (was this their "Googleyness"?) permeated Google Hangouts and made me about as comfortable as I could hope to be during six hours of intellectually demanding interviews. Still, knowing that the interviewers could not feel my presence as well as they would in person, I tried to make up for the communication impediments by speaking loudly and clearly, sitting up straight, and erring on the side of over-communication when it otherwise might not have been clear what was happening (e.g. I would let my interviewers know that I was looking off-screen to consult a list of questions I had prepared for them).

Interviewing remotely was just the first step of an initially-remote journey through Google. As far as I know, I may not be allowed in the office until July 2021 (almost a full year from now!!!) A brief moment of pause for the absence of in-office perks and orientation that Google is so beloved for. (Sigh). Looking on the bright side, starting out remotely will allow me to separate the amazingness of the in-office perks Google offers from my enjoyment of the work. I found it hard at my previous job to separate my love for the work from my love for the company and all the lifestyle benefits it offered. It is important to value both the company and the work in any job, but I can see how it will be beneficial for me to observe my enjoyment of the job as a direct outcome of the work itself in order to get the clearest sense of whether Developer Advocacy is "right" for me.

See You Soon, Google

The other side of interviewing remotely and working remotely through COVID-19 is that what would normally feel unreal feels especially unreal due to the lack of a change of scenery. I didn't stop going into my old office, there were no in-person Goodbyes (unless Zoom is the new "in-person"); this might as well be a brief vacation before I return to ActionIQ. I have to convince myself that I am starting a job at Google in a week. I am starting a job at Google in a week. I am starting a job at Google in a week.

To my future self, seeking a reminder of the learnings I carried out of my first job and into my next one at Google; To my current self, seeking to better understand the personal and professional implications of the last three years of my life at ActionIQ; And to those Internet folks seeking to supplement their own experiences with insights from others':

In my first week at ActionIQ, a tech startup based in New York City, I was assigned an onboarding mentor who I would quickly find out had only been on the job for a month by the time I joined; everything he taught me he did so as a welcome reminder to his barely seasoned self. I had onboarding sessions with four other newbies, led by the CTO, the Head of Product, the CEO, and the office manager who doubled as an event planner/HR rep/security guard/ninja. I had thoroughly explored the single-unit Clue-themed office in a matter of hours, including the cabinets stocked fresh with groceries and Bai teas I wouldn't have dared spend money on as an indebted NYU student-turned-grad. As a Forward Deployed Engineer – an all-encompassing title for a data engineer who works with customers to make their data usable within the ActionIQ software – I became chiefly responsible for all technical matters for two clients desperately in need of an owner after my colleague decided to leave the company to pursue grad school. "Not fully onboarded" would be putting it nicely, but by that point I was the only team member with the capacity to take on any sort of work as my teammates swam neck-deep in broken tooling and demanding customers and hacky solutions whose quality came second to the primary requirement of being a solution at all. Fast-paced, challenging, reliably unpredictable, this was exactly the sort of startup shenanigans I had been looking for.

A large, established company might gradually and cautiously grant responsibilities to its recent graduates, testing the waters with small tasks, giving work of higher complexity in response to proven competence. The 70-person startup can't afford not to give its recent graduates responsibilities that might, under normal circumstances, be considered beyond their qualifications. This level of responsibility often translates into newbies being asked to take on workloads that leave them wondering how and where to even begin, and with little guidance. Looked at in reverse, newbies are allowed to take on workloads that they do not necessarily have the know-how to take on, or that are beyond the scope of their role.

At my first visit with a client, I was feeling pretty pleased with my professional self. The client's office was located in the Empire State Building, and we had to have our photos taken at the front desk to be granted temporary badges for entry up to the 21st floor. It felt like an old Hollywood movie (or, at least, what I imagine an old Hollywood movie to be), where the young professionals strut confidently into the lobby and head up for some *important business*, nodding politely at the other sophisticated professionals who tip their hats and say "Good afternoon'" with a smile. Never mind that we caused a minor traffic jam when we got stuck at the turnstile and had to be helped by one of the security guards because our badges weren't working. Once we made it to our floor and into our meeting, it was time for ActionIQ's technical expert to be introduced. I was that expert, of course. It felt strange to suddenly be playing in the same field as professionals who had been at their careers for years and years. I was fresh out of college, but as far as they were concerned I was an experienced engineer who would be responsible for the integrity of their data. Somehow I managed to look and talk the part, or so my coworkers would tell me. That is, until the client asked me the most basic question: "Where were you before ActionIQ?" Now, I knew that they would be displeased to hear that a fresh-out-of-college noob would be handling all technical aspects of their engagements with ActionIQ, so I gave them the name of the company I had interned at, Viacom, and the name of the company I had interned at before that, Verizon – I felt pretty impressive dropping those V cards. Then they asked me what I had done at those companies, and I fumbled and told them that I was an intern on so-and-so team. My cover was blown. The client was visibly caught off guard by the news and a momentary awkward silence filled the conference room. At the same time that I drowned in the flood of silence I created, a lesson was learned. Two lessons, actually: 1) Nobody needs to know how new you are, and 2) It hardly matters how much skill you have so long as you present a certain level of skill. There are exceptions, as always, but the pattern I found was that I did not need to have the answers on the spot, even in the face of clients, provided I could feign expertise for long enough to become the expert I was purported to be. This skill of communicating an aura of professionalism and know-how has proven almost as important as the know-how itself, a principle that was reinforced constantly across client interactions. Further, by being brought into a room of experienced professionals, I was driven to strive for an equal level of professionalism, and with so many examples to mimic I became better at looking the part. All the while, I worked hard to achieve the level of expertise I wanted them to think I had – I was striving to fit into the image I had begun to convey. With the formidable technical challenges I was asked to take on, it was not long before I found myself fitting more and more effortlessly into that image.

Even as I was challenged within my role, I had opportunities to grow outside of it, by nature of the company being as young as it was. I organized the first two outings for the newly established Women at AIQ group, and many more outings for my team. I unofficially became the CFO (Chief Food Officer – title self-given) by organizing group order-in and requesting food items be delivered to the office. I hosted Paint Nights for coworkers to hang out and create masterpieces while eating Sweetgreen – painting and salad go well together, did you know? Once our company expanded from one office suite to two(!), I worked with our Head of Design to design a mural for the new office space. Art and event planning were things I loved but chose not to make a career out of; working at ActionIQ made it easy for me to explore those passions on the side.

At the time that I joined ActionIQ, my team was six members strong and very unstructured. By unstructured, I mean that there was no concept of levels for the role – no matter your experience level, you were Forward Deployed Engineer. There was little documentation, and what existed was quickly becoming stale thanks to the fast pace of change we experienced. There was some semblance of an onboarding process, but the majority of it was ad-hoc and focused on "learning by doing" (i.e. just start doing work because we have no time to waste). Being the ninth FDE ever at ActionIQ (two FDEs had switched roles, and one had left the company), I had the unique opportunity to be an entry-level employee involved in some disproportionately ginormous structural decisions. I was answering questions they simply don't need to ask at well-established companies: What sort of team structure and leveling can we put in place to support team scalability and individual career growth? How should the interview process look – what criteria are we hiring for and what questions can we ask to make confident determinations? Outside of my team I took part in establishing company-wide best practices: I helped the new QA team to understand everything that was wrong with our testing process; I worked with the Product team to formulate and prioritize better internal tooling; I broke down our flawed alerting system to the new head of DevOps who would become its new owner. By the time I left the FDE team to join the Full Stack team, I was the second most tenured FDE on a team of 14, and I was leading our documentation and onboarding efforts, while heavily involved in hiring for new FDEs.

After two years as an FDE, I passed the interview process for an internal transfer to the Full Stack team. Before I even began on my new team, I was asked to manage our winter interns (winterns) through a three week program for female students from universities across NYC. I didn't jump at the opportunity, and in fact I turned it down initially, eager to prove myself to my new team as soon as possible. With the help of my manager's manager, however, I arrived at the realization that this was the ideal low-commitment introduction to managing and mentoring a team. I had mentored new team members before, but never more than one at a time and I was not their manager by any stretch of the imagination. Aside from the temptation of a new experience, I was warmed by the notion that I could be a confident female technical figure for these college women to relate to and, in the best case, be empowered by. Despite my initial hesitation, mentoring the winterns was one of the most rewarding experiences of my time at ActionIQ. In only three weeks, five exceptional women taught themselves a new programming language and employed a new framework for a data analysis project that they presented to the entire company. As their manager, I managed to provide them with the technical tools, professional guidance, and moral support that would embolden them on their three week journey, and I managed to stay out of their way enough for them to see that they were entirely capable of understanding complex problems on their own. It's uncomfortably corny to say, but: even though it was my job to uplift and inspire the winterns, I found that they uplifted and inspired me tenfold.

At the end of three weeks, I rode the high out of working with the winterns into working as a Full Stack engineer. The new role meant no more engaging with marketing clients, and I would be able to focus my full energy on growing as an engineer and as a collaborator within a high-caliber engineering organization. Eight months of Full Stack engineering at ActionIQ measured up to what felt like years' worth of experience and insights. Unlike in my role as an FDE, I had several mentors and committed code changes that underwent thorough, relentless reviews before they could be merged – having any solution at all was no longer sufficient for my purposes. Perhaps it's because Full Stack as a startup entity was already so well-defined by its ubiquity, whereas Forward Deployed Engineering was a recent and fairly custom branch of engineering, that working on the Full Stack team allowed me many of the perks of working at a startup without the constant scrambling and maneuvering around broken tooling that I never seemed to have time to fix. I could build things without worrying about anything other than the thing I was building (with few exceptions... illegible legacy code, for one). Exploration and experimentation were encouraged, so what followed was exposure to software engineering ideas and tools that broadened my view of the technical landscape. "Mob programming" was one of my favorites, along with other strategies for agile development, like retrospectives reliant on colorful post-it notes and storytelling. (Test-driven development was one of my least favorites – I respect it, sure, but you can't make me like it). Two years in to my time at ActionIQ, processes and structures were already far more sophisticated than two years beforehand, but our company was not so siloed by then that I didn't have the opportunity to work closely with other teams; namely, I worked directly with Product and Design teams on a regular basis, and less regularly with other engineering teams whose ownership overlapped with ours. I witnessed and took part in a drastic reorganization of the Engineering org, thus in the span of a few short months I was immersed in the hows, whats, and whys of one foundational organizational structure over another. I could have easily stayed on the Full Stack team many months more without a pause in my learning.

You might be questioning whether I have shaped my experience into a positive one retroactively to justify my decision to work at ActionIQ. You are right to question! Allow me to caveat this entire reflection with the recognition that my perspective is biased towards my own experience and personality, and that I am choosing to see my experience as a positive one out of a desire to make the most of every opportunity; this is not a retrofitting of my decisions into my goals, so much as an acknowledgment of how my decisions have equipped me for them. Further, I realize that starting at a startup might not be the most fitting decision for everyone. This reflection is less an argument for starting your career at a startup than a case for seeking to stay challenged and pursuing opportunities that accelerate your growth in ways that inspire and excite you. In my experience, the education I received at ActionIQ, within my main role and beyond, was incalculable and could largely be attributed to merely being where I was. Still, I wouldn't discount the opportunity for growth outside of such an atmosphere. With nearly three years of full-time startup experience under my belt, Google presented a whole new suite of opportunities for personal and professional growth that I was and am eager to explore, and all the more ready for having had the breadth of experiences afforded to me by starting at a startup.

Nobody told me how uneasy it would feel to part ways with the company that has both caused me so much discomfort by challenging me in unpredictable ways and much comfort by interweaving me into a close-knit community of intelligent and kind employees. The curious, adventurous attitude that brought me to this startup might have been replaced by a desire to hold on to a great thing had it not been for my self-imposed reminders that discomfort is key to growth (e.g. the watercolor painted text I keep at my desk which declared my commitment to "live on the edge of my comfort zone"). Though I was never entirely comfortable at ActionIQ, I have arrived at a point where there is more to be learned elsewhere. Three years ago, I began my career at a startup where I found myself conquering complexities that were beyond my skill level and making decisions I was practically unqualified to make, and I am all the better for it. With full intentions of focusing my energy on my new role at Google, I bid ActionIQ a heartfelt adieu.