by

Getting to Bangalore

I’m in Bangalore this week to work with our engineering team here. That’s worth a post on it’s own at some point (tons of job related stuff that I should get around to posting). What I wanted to post about how incredible it is to get all the way out to India from the states, and the incredible complexity of travel this far. Our flight from San Francisco, on Emirates, was delayed four hours since the arriving flight from Dubai had not made it in yet. Since there was a huge delay, we ended up missing our connection in Dubai that would have taken us on to Banglore, thus we stayed in the Dubai airport for six hours waiting for the next flight. Made it to Bangalore Monday ~8am, an hour and a half ride later we were at our hotel then went on to the office.

Bangalore is a pretty impressive city. For one it feels a bit more progressive than other Indian cities I’ve been in. I was last in India January 2009, in Mumbai. The streets are quite clean, and there’s signage everywhere that says “don’t drink and drive” (in English). In fact, at this one round-a-bout, there’s a (for lack of a better word) sculpture of a guy who hit a tree on his scooter that says something like “don’t let this be you.”  There are apparently four subway lines coming to the city, with one supposed to be opening this year. Given how bad the traffic is here, that should be a godsend. It takes us ~30m to travel the ~5km to the office. Yikes.

We’re here working with the team to design a bunch of the major components of the product that will be made here (again, I should blog on the latest job news) and to kick off our next few sprints. It’s fun to work with energetic thinkers and spend time brainstorming on the whats and hows of our work.

I’m here till Friday, when I leave for Mumbai to spend the weekend with my sister. From there, it’s back to the states on Sunday.