We asked Jim, an engineering manager in London, to share a typical day with us. As part of Oculus London, he supports the social experiences team building Oculus Rooms and the recently announced Oculus Venues.

His team in London includes engineering, product management, art, design, QA and user researchers and they work closely with other teams in Dallas and California. We asked Jim what keeps him at Facebook, he told us it's the people. He applied because some of the smartest people he had worked with at Linden Lab had joined Facebook and he wanted to be able to learn from them again. When he arrived he discovered that everyone else was just as smart: at Facebook and Oculus he's had the chance to work with Andrei Alexandrescu, Kent Beck, and John Carmack who had a huge influence on him earlier in his career.

Here's a look at a typical day in his life through his own words and lens.

8:00 am: I wake up and listen to the news and some of the Today program on Radio 4 while checking Workplace notifications from bed to see if there's anything I need to respond to immediately. On the way to the shower I take a picture of my eldest son Luke's Chewbacca pumpkin, that he made the night before.

As it was a lovely bright autumn morning I cycle to Brighton Station via the seafront and am rewarded with a lovely view of a blue sky and calm, shining sea framing the old West pier which was destroyed by fire just before we moved to Brighton a decade ago.

I was also very happy to see that parts of the ruined pier have been incorporated in the recent seafront renovations, so it will be remembered even when the rest of it has been reclaimed by the sea.

Once I'm on the train, I turn my phone in to a Wi-Fi hotspot and enjoy my banana, cereal bar, and cappuccino while responding to email and Workplace group posts.

As we dive deeper in to the beautiful Sussex countryside I lose connectivity and switch to writing code. I'm currently making improvements to the open source ReactVR Pairs example which uses Replicated Redux stores to easily network ReactVR applications and demonstrates how the approach can be used to build sophisticated optimistic consistency mechanisms to hide network latency. Replicated Redux builds on the work of fellow Facebook London engineer Dan Abramov, adding ideas from the MASSIVE-3 system I helped build at The Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham while I was doing PhD research in the 90s: it's great to see that those ideas are still useful as VR goes mainstream 20 years later.

10:00 am: When I arrive at London Bridge it's time to get another coffee, so I cycle along Victoria embankment, then stop at Monmouth for an espresso and Fopp for an NME as I head through Covent Garden, bumping into Mario on the way.

11:00 am: As it's still a lovely day Mike Armstrong (the creator of ReactVR, which grew out of the React Native development done at Facebook London) and I decide to walk around regents park while talking about the next Oculus infrastructure pieces we might want to build in London to support Social VR.

12:00 pm: At noon the whole team heads up to Pi in the Sky for lunch to enjoy an amazing panorama, delicious food and good conversation.

1:00 pm: After lunch we have the Rooms team weekly meeting where we go over sprint plans for all of the projects in progress; look at the current bug count and burn down towards release; see some demos of work in progress features; discuss which features should make the cut to go in to Rooms 1.7 and work out how those decisions impact the release date and future plans. We also discuss our recent trip to Oculus Zurich and talk about some of the potential collaborations with team there as well as our plan to migrate to Mercurial and Sandcastle (which are also developed, in part, by teams at Facebook London).

2:00 pm: After the team meeting I walk to our Brock Street office to interview a candidate. On the way back I say hello to some colleagues in Developer Infrastructure and congratulate them on open sourcing RacerD: a groundbreaking new tool for finding Race conditions in multi-threaded programs that Peter was discussing with Sir Tony Hoare when I was supporting the team several years ago.

4:00 pm: The sun rises over California, so we have an engineering, design, product, and analytics sync with Oculus leadership in Menlo Park to talk about plans for 2018 and the people we'll need to hire in London to make those plans happen.

6:00 pm: With all my meetings done, I head back up to Pi in the Sky to make a sandwich and then cycle back to London Blackfriars to get the train home.