Making Seattle my home

I moved to Seattle about 4 months ago, after having lived in Boston for a little more than seven years. Now that I've settled in a bit I thought now would be a good time to write up some of my thoughts on the city and lifestyle here.

The view from Kerry Park in Queen Anne, which was about a 10-minute walk from my house in Queen Anne - before I moved to Wallingford recently.

Upon leaving Boston, I could have moved pretty much anywhere. Most of the cities with a strong tech industry had good job opportunities for my wife, as well, and of course Google has offices in most major cities in the US. So we had plenty of options. We both went to Berkeley for grad school and absolutely love the Bay Area, but we decided not to move back there for a bunch of reasons. The main one being that I would have been working in Mountain View and my wife would have been in SF, and that would have meant a hell of a commute for either of us. It was also not clear that we would have been able to afford a decent house in the Bay Area in any neighborhoods that we would want to live. Our preference would have been to live in the East Bay, bit that would have made the commute problem even worse. With a two-year old son, I'm not willing to go through  an hour commute twice a day -- it's simply not worth it to me.

Seattle has a lot of what we were looking for. We live right in the middle of the city (in Wallingford) and for me it's a 10-minute bike commute (to the Google office in Fremont) along the shore of Lake Union, with views of downtown, the Space Needle, and Mount Rainier. It is a fantastic neighborhood with shops, bars, restaurants, playgrounds, and one of the best elementary schools in Seattle (John Stanford) just a few blocks away.

I realized at one point that I probably know more people in Seattle than any other city -- including Boston -- with the University of Washington, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all here I had this large pre-fab social network already in place. The tech industry is huge here and there seems to be a very active startup community.

The geography here is absolutely stunning. Anywhere you go in Seattle you are surrounded by water, trees, snow-capped mountains. From our house we have a beautiful view to downtown Seattle and Lake Union, with seaplanes taking off and landing overhead. It is also a dense enough city that we can walk or bike to pretty much everything we would need; of course, a big part of this is because we live in Seattle proper, rather than the Eastlake communities of Kirkland, Bellevue, or Redmond, which tend to be more spread out.

This is totally the view from my house in Wallingford. Yes, I would like for that damn tree to not be in the way, but what can you do?

It is no surprise that Seattle is a far more relaxed and progressive place than Boston. A lot of this is, of course, the West Coast vs. East Coast distinction, and in a lot of ways Seattle exemplifies the West Coast aesthetic, much as Boston does the East. Way way more fixie bikes, tattoos, farmers markets, lesbians, hippies, and hippie lesbians with tattoos riding fixie bikes through farmers markets here in Seattle than anywhere in New England. In a lot of ways it's like San Francisco Lite -- a bit less edgy, more approachable, more gentrified, but still very forward-thinking. I feel very much like I belong here, whereas in Boston I always felt like a bit of an outsider.

So far I'm digging the restaurant and cocktail scene in Seattle, which is more adventurous and less stuffy than what you find in Boston (although Boston has some damn good food). I miss really good Chinese food (which is harder to find than you would expect), and surprisingly Seattle doesn't have a ton of great Mexican food options, although I happen to live about a block from the best taco truck in town. Thai and sushi are excellent here, and there seems to be a lot more casual, foodie-type places all over town which do crazy shit like Korean comfort food and ice cream sandwiches. 

What am I not so crazy about? Well, I'm on the fence about the weather. The summer has (mostly) been beautiful - 75 degrees, sunny, no humidity at all. Mixed in have been some cooler rainy days that feel out of place for the season. The first couple of months we were here, in April and May, it was rainy and overcast pretty much every day. I take it this is typical for Seattle. The long term question is whether I will be more or less content with this pattern than Boston, which has a much wider temperature range, a couple of months of unbearably cold and snowy weather each year, and sweltering humid summers. It remains to be seen.

Second, everyone in Seattle appears to be white. This is not true of course, but at least in the neighborhoods where I spend most of my time, there is a lot less racial and cultural diversity than Boston. My understanding is that this is due to largely historical reasons where minorities were shut out of many neighborhoods, but the effects persist today. I will ponder this more deeply the next time I'm sitting at a sidewalk café with my dog while sipping an organic soy latte and checking Google+ on my MacBook Pro. It's the thing to do here, you know.

How do you evaluate your grad students?

One of the issues that I always struggled with as an academic -- and I know many other faculty struggle with -- is keeping grad students on track and giving them useful feedback to help them along in their careers. PhD students often get lost in the weeds at some point (or many points!) during grad school. Of course, part of doing a PhD is figuring out what you want to work on and doing things that might seem to be "unproductive" to the untrained eye. On the other hand, many PhD students grind to a halt, spending months or even years on side projects or simply doing nothing at all. One problem my own students often had was working super hard to submit a paper and then doing almost no new work for 2-3 months while waiting to get the reviews back.

When a student gets stuck in a rut, how do you help them out of it? How do you help students clear a path to productivity?

One thing that many PhD programs lack is any regular and formal evaluation of a student's progress. Harvard never did anything formal, although I tried to get something going it did not last beyond one year -- not enough faculty cared to participate, and we couldn't agree on the process or desired outcomes. At Berkeley, every PhD student got a formal letter every year with a "letter grade" indicating how well you were doing and with some optional comments from your advisor on your overall progress. Although that feedback could have been delivered informally, there was a psychological impact to the formal letter and the idea that all of the professors were meeting in a smoky room to talk about your standing. CMU has its infamous  "Black Friday" where all the profs literally do get together to score the grad students. Not having been to CMU, I wonder how this was viewed by the students -- did they find this feedback valuable, stressful, or just plain annoying?

Although this kind of feedback can be useful, for many students it goes in one ear and out the other. I think that part of the reason is that there is often no penalty for doing poorly on a review -- about the only thing a PhD program can threaten you with is kicking you out, and most programs that I know of avoid that unless there's a case where a student has been totally unproductive for a period of several years. It's hard to get kicked out of grad school. By the same token there's little incentive to do well on a review: you're not going to graduate any sooner or get paid more. (Sidebar - should PhD programs pay high-performing grad students bonuses?)

The other issue is that these mechanisms are somewhat open loop in the sense that the student is not expected to lay out a plan and stick to it. Most PhD programs expect students to file some kind of formal plan of study or research leading towards their degree, but it is usually a matter of paperwork and is done just once, or maybe twice, during the course of the program. This has almost no value to the student and is just a matter of paperwork. My feeling is that students would benefit tremendously from a more frequent and formal planning process.

At Google, the approach we use for planning is based on OKRs, or "objectives and key results." Every employee and team is expected to come up with their OKRs for the coming quarter, and score the OKRs from the previous quarter in terms of how much progress was made towards each goal. This is extremely useful process since it gets you thinking about what you need to do over the next 3 months (which seems to be about the right planning horizon for most activities) and you have the chance to reflect on your successes and failures of the previous quarter. It's not expected that you achieve 100% of your goals -- if you are doing so, then your OKRs were not ambitious enough -- you should be shooting for a grade of 70-80%.

I wonder if grad students wouldn't benefit from using something like OKRs for planning their research. A student should be able to say what they are doing over the next 3 months. Looking back on the previous 3 months and grading your progress tells you whether you are generally on track. Having quarterly OKR scores can also help advisors point out where the student needs to improve and documents clear-cut cases where a student has been unproductive (something that both students and advisors are often in denial about). Thoughts?

My experience with Amazon Cloud Player

As I've posted here before, I'm an avid music fan and collector. A few years ago I decided to go all-digital with my music collection, and since then have mostly refused to buy CDs in favor of digital music online -- mostly from Amazon's (excellent) MP3 store, as well as iTunes. However, this created a new problem: where to keep the music, and how to keep it synced between my various devices -- home laptop, work laptop, work desktop, home desktop, phone, iPad. Lots of people have this problem. My music collection is now more than 50 GB and it's no small feat to keep it synchronized between devices.

For a while I had this crazy scheme where I would only buy new music on my home laptop (the "master" library) which I could sync directly to my phone. From the home laptop I would push new music (using rsync) to my home desktop, which would allow me to listen to it on the stereo at home (via a first-generation Squeezebox player). I would also push it to my desktop at Harvard, so I could listen at work. Once I moved to Google, syncing from home to work became more difficult, although not impossible -- but I could only do so when on the Google VPN, which I can only access on my work laptop. So I modified the aforementioned crazy scheme by syncing from the home laptop to my old desktop machine at Harvard, from which I would pull down new music to my work desktop and laptop. In this way, at least I always knew where the master copy was, and the flow of new data along any edge was always unidirectional, thereby avoiding sync conflicts.

Over time the complexity of this scheme became a real annoyance, especially since I could only buy new music when I was using my home laptop, and syncing to my iPhone and iPad required manually plugging them into that same machine.

So, about a month ago I switched over to using Amazon Cloud Drive, in the hopes that it would fix this problem once and for all. In terms of solving the sync problem, it has been a great success: all of my music now simply lives on Amazon’s servers, and (except for my phone) I don’t need to worry about syncing it to any other devices. For that, Amazon has a Cloud Player app for Android which can pull the music down to my phone directly, without having to stage it on any of my other machines. So I can buy music on the phone, which is immediately available in my Cloud Drive, and I can pull it down to the phone if I want to. (I even bought and downloaded an album to my phone while on an Alaskan Airlines flight, using the in-flight WiFi.) There is an amazing instant-gratification factor here: read about an album on Pitchfork, it’s in your library and on all of your devices in under a minute.

Now, I mostly listen to music at work using the Amazon Cloud Player in my web browser. I don’t even bother syncing a copy to my various machines, though from time to time I do download new music to my home laptop just to have a local backup (in case Amazon goes out of business or something).

Unfortunately, as a user experience goes, I think the web-based Cloud Player has a long way to go:

• The web interface is terribly slow, especially with a large music collection such as my own. I have more than 12,000 songs and 1,000 albums in the collection, and opening up the Web-based Cloud Player takes a good 20 seconds. The worst part is scrolling through the music’s “album” view: for some damn reason I always get a yellow spinner when paging through the set of albums, and it can take 20-30 seconds to load the album art for each page so I can see what I want to listen to. Plenty of other websites have solved the problem of previewing large numbers of images, so I can’t understand why Amazon’s site is so slow.
  
• I rarely have problems with the music playback, though keep in mind I am usually listening from Google’s very well provisioned network. (I also happen to live in Seattle, spitting distance from Amazon HQ, though I’m not sure how much that helps.) However, given that I generally have a few dozen other tabs open on my browser in several windows, I have noticed that the Cloud Player running in the background was inducing additional lag. Now, I only run Cloud Player from a different browser (Safari) dedicated to that purpose.
  
• Every 24 hours, the login credentials on the Cloud Player time out and it will stop playback immediately and force me to log in again. This is highly annoying, especially when I’m in the middle of rocking out to Gang Gang Dance. And of course, when I login again, the Cloud Player has forgotten its state so I have to wait 30 seconds to reload my music library and figue out which song I was listening to and fire it up again -- a good minute of rocking-out time lost. I can use Google docs, Gmail, and a bunch of other online services without having to enter my login credentials every day; why can’t Amazon solve this problem? Maybe it’s a licensing issue, but it makes for a painful user experience.
  
• When I first signed up, I had to run Amazon’s MP3 uploader to load my music library into their servers. Given that 99% of the music is available on Amazon’s own MP3 store -- and I suspect a good 15% of my library was originally purchased from same said store -- I was surprised that I had to go through this painful step. To add insult to injury, the uploader for some reason capped bandwidth at 500 Kbps or so, meaning it took nearly a week and a half to upload all my music. (Made even worse because the login credentials would time out every day and would not resume uploading until I logged in again.) I should have been able to upload my entire music library to Amazon in less than 20 hours on my 5 Mbps connection from home, so the artificial cap seems ridiculous.
  
• Somewhat humorously, when I buy new music from Amazon’s MP3 store, there is a delay before it shows up in my library. I can hit reload and watch each song being loaded into the library, and it seems to take a few seconds for each one to appear. I assumed that adding music from Amazon’s MP3 store to my Cloud Drive would be a matter of creating the S3 equivalent of a symlink, so what the hell is going on here?

Just for the record I have not yet tried Google Music, which is in beta, since I am too lazy to move my music collection over yet again. From what I have seen, the web interface is pretty similar so there's not a good enough reason -- yet -- to switch. I'm curious to see what Apple's iCloud is like, but I really like having my music collection liberated from Apple's DRM.

So, I am somewhat surprised at how bare-bones the Amazon Cloud Player is. Given that this is a web app, you would think there would be all kinds of great features that go beyond what you can do inside of a “closed” app like iTunes. For example, there’s no way to share a link to a song or album in Amazon’s MP3 store with Facebook or Twitter -- I have to go search for the listing on Amazon’s MP3 store by hand, and post that manually. This seems like a lost revenue opportunity for Amazon, since it’s hard to share with my friends online that I’m loving the new Bon Iver album and give them a link to buy it (hey, maybe with a referral discount).

Overall it's awesome to use this service and I love having my music everywhere all at once, and not having to manually maintain a library. If the web player were more sophisticated and responsive it would be a slam dunk.