San Francisco

Famed Tech Hub

Published in

The Monad Nomad

5 min readMar 26, 2016

I had several people express concerns that I was going to go down to SF and never return. This is a thing that happens to Canadian developers, apparently. That obviously did not happen (おはよう from Osaka, btw).

Burn Out

Yep, I started to burn out in SF. Actually, the burn out started in Vancouver, and got progressively worse. I’ve taken on too many work projects, and was coding literally from morning to night without leaving home. I talked to the publisher of the course that I’m writing, and they were extremely nice and agreed to help relax deadlines so that I could get some rest.

Functional Programming

Community

SF does have a large number of FP meetups, and for things that we’ve had under the VanFP umbrella in Vancouver. Elm, OCaml, PureScript, and so on, all have their own meetups, which is amazing!

While I sadly didn’t attend any FP events (the “big ones” were right before and after the trip), I did have a really nice coffee with one of the organizers of the Bay Area Haskell Users Group. It sounds like the challenges are largely the same as in Vancouver, especially finding speakers. It sounds like the SF community is good at nurturing new entrants to Haskell, which is really great to hear :)

Companies

There are a few companies in SF using functional languages. According to one of my old colleagues, there is apparently an “explosion” of companies looking for people with an FP background. This is very cool, and obviously a great sign for functional programmers everywhere!

It sounds like a lot of the recent resurgence in FP has been driven my two factors: React introducing people to general FP concepts, and an interest in Elixir in the Ruby community (mostly for performance). It’s interesting, especially considering that we’ve expected that the move to multicore would be the big push. Sure, networked and cloud computing are both factors, but the story seems to be shaping up to be about the intersection of ease-of-use, enforced cleanliness, and speed.

The City of San Francisco

The Good

The Workshop Cafe. Seriously, this place is amazing. I had an idea for a similar place a while back, and almost pursued it. It’s nice to see that the idea was valid ;) It was also cool to sit in any cafe and hear startup talk.

The ocean waves by Outer Sunset are quite nice, and the area is picturesque. There are some really nice sections of the city, and I really enjoyed all of the Victorian/Edwardian architecture (though Art Deco is also quite prevalent). Japantown has some pretty awesome shops and restaurants, too.

The Bad

SF has a serious poverty problem. It makes Vancouver’s DTES look like a black tie gala. I was pretty shocked to see homeless children living in an alleyway with their mother (on a previous trip to SF). Considering how much money is zipping around SF, it’s stunning that it’s so bad. Then again, I come from a (comparatively) much more socialist country. The amount of poverty that Vancouver has is outrageous, which makes the situation in SF simply mind blowing.

Wow housing is expensive! Never mind that the Canadian dollar was worth ~$0.70 USD, the cost of renting a place on an ongoing basis is crazy. We stayed in Outer Sunset, which is the absolute end of the train line, and it was still expensive by Vancouver standards.

MUNI, well, could be better. It took an hour of very crowded transit to get into downtown. We had to walk a few times, because the train or bus would stop running the whole line for unknown reasons.

Brass Tacks

Money

I’ve had a few people ask me if this leg of the trip was affordable. It’s San Francisco, so by SF standards, yes, it was. It cost me roughly what I budgeted, and I wasn’t super careful with my money. I split a place with a friend, and while it wasn’t super fancy, we could have found something cheaper in the same area, too.

I spent about 25% more in rent versus my old place in Vancouver
I saved a bunch by taking the train down the coast rather than flying
I don’t drive, so I only spent around $60 in transportation within the city
The abysmal CAD-USD conversion rate did hurt

This was expected to be one of the more expensive legs of my travels, so yes, SF is expensive, but not enough to prevent me from doing that again.

Experience

It’s really not that much different living in SF than in Vancouver. People have the same wants and worries, love coffee culture, and have a similar accent. The biggest difference was having to convert to Imperial units, and double-take all the missing “u”s in words.

Sure, there’s less space in SF: cafe lines go out the door, because the register is less than a meter from it. Working from a cafe seems to be very much the norm in SF, which suits me quite well!

Yes, there’s a lot more money in SF, but that doesn’t really make much impact on the average person day-to-day. The cost of living is also higher, and we know that above a certain threshold, money has zero impact on happiness. It is cool that there are so many companies in the Bay Area using functional languages effectively. The high number of developers is also nice, and the fact that you can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone about their startup is both cliché and awesome.

Am I going to get sucked into the SF black hole never to be seen in Canada again? No. It’s certainly a nice place to visit, but I’m not rushing to get a green card.