Arriving in Barcelona
Wednesday
Off I went. New semester, new city, new adventures! I met a friend at the airport who thought I was moving back to Portugal. Nope, not this time. This time it is beaches, cheap beer, tapas, sun, nice weather and... wait, that I had in Lisbon too? No, this, my tenth and final semster of studies, I'm living in Barcelona.
Last semester as you all know includes writing a thesis which is exactly what I will be doing for the majority of my time here. More specifically I'm doing it at Tuenti, a private social network with some 12 million users here in Spain. It is, I've learned yesterday, the most trafficed site in Spain with many many billion pageviews per month.
Thursday
First day at Tuenti. Met and greeted a lot of people, of whom I only remember a handful of names. Luckily the office is not that large, hosting roughly 30 employees, but has support from the head office in Madrid with another 200.
I'll be joining Toni, a recommender system and data analyst expert from Telefonica, in improving and building a recommendation system for the Tuenti site. What, exactly, I'll be doing, no one knows. Least of all me. But I'm sure that time will sort that out.
Breakfast, Cafe com leche y mini chapato, and the office building at Placa de Catalunya.
Friday
Met and greeted more people. Awesome people. Friendly and cheery. Everyone is truly enthusiastic about, well, everything it seems, even the daunting tasks. Spent the morning visiting the Spanish bureaucracy. That was largely a failure. Need to be registered at an apartment, get a personal identification number and then, maybe, I can get the social security stuff sorted. Colleagues are guiding me through the process. It will be an experience, especially after having heard all the horror stories from Nick.
The afternoon was spent reading papers. I'm trying to collect all my thesis notes on a separate site, check in there if you're interested in what I'm about to work on.
View from the office window and my desk.
