SF Climbing and Coding

Tuesday and Wednesday last week I spent at the NodeSummit conference. They ran a shuttle from SoMa near my room, which was convenient. I met a lot of JS coders and did some good networking with companies using node.js and many bay area companies. Tuesday after a long day at the conference I went home to rest and then had a nice dinner at Basil on Folsom St. The portions were small but it was really flavorful. Wednesday night I worked on a coding assignment that was the first step of a job interview, and then I had dinner at Triptych, which had some mixed reviews on yelp but I really liked it.

Thursday morning I slept in and slowly walked over to Mission Cliffs for some climbing, stopping for a quick slice of pizza and some unsuccessful coffee shop wifi hunting along the way. I met up with Shannon, another companion found on OKCupid who turned out to be not entirely a stranger either. I think some of the people I know in SF are pretty well connected, so I guess I should stop being surprised by these things, but anyway, it's nice to meet someone that is a friend of a friend. So Shannon and I climbed on the very tall walls at Mission Cliffs, which was really fun, and then we had some pho at a restaurant across the street and chatted about Burning Man, SF, etc.

After that I headed back to SoMa and met up with another company that is doing some cool node.js open source work and went out for drinks with them. I snuck off from there to another OKC meeting (3 in 6 days!) at a bar on Folsom.

Friday morning I stopped briefly at Epicenter Cafe which is supposedly frequented by startup employees and then headed to another SoMa office for a series of in-person interviews. (Details in a future post perhaps). After that I met up again with Tess and we spent the remainder of the afternoon lazing around in Dolores Park and peoplewatching. Soon enough it was time for me to catch the BART to the airport. Walking to the BART we were stopped by two early 20s girls walking their bikes. They apparently run a local fashion video blog and wanted to film us (meaning: Tess) for it. It was pretty amusing. I take a full 0.2% credit for that and the other 99.8% goes to Tess.

Overall it was a super fun and productive visit. It basically alternated awesome work related things with awesome social things and I'm sure I'll have fond memories of this particular trip for a while.