Sarah Chen

Software engineer at a FAANG company, 2+ hour daily Caltrain commute from SF to Mountain View. That's 50+ audiobooks per year minimum. I rate books by "commute-worthiness" - can you follow it while half-asleep at 6AM on a packed train surrounded by other zombies? Grew up in Seattle, CS degree from UW, now debugging distributed systems by day and debugging my book choices by night. I have opinions about both. Last week I fixed a production outage at 2AM and then couldn't sleep, so I finished a 12-hour sci-fi series. No regrets. My boyfriend Kevin thinks I love podcasts about optimization more than him. He might be right, but he's also the one who got me hooked on The Bobiverse, so he only has himself to blame. That series got me through three months of on-call hell. I listen at 1.5x default, 1.75x for business books that could've been blog posts (looking at you, every startup book ever). Ray Porter is my spirit narrator. If I ever meet him, I will embarrass myself.