First weekend after starting the internship

I am now three weeks in the US, two weeks in the shared house, and one week in the internship.

To destroy all preconceptions of the U.S.: It is extremely easy to get tons of good food here: Great salads, fruits, meat, everything. I like Trader Joe's much more than Safeway. The Aldi brothers should bring Trader Joe's to Germany. Food in general is expensive, but e.g. salads aren't really much more expensive as in Germany. 

I do a lot of sports. Biking to and from work, running in the Baylands, swimming. Today we wanted to go biking/hiking in the hills beyond the campus, but -- to be honest -- I am currently not fit enough for that. I will try again in a month. And: Everyone also seem to do sports too. I have seen dozens of cyclists today. You see people running all the time.

Third preconception to destroy: Crime. Crime doesn't seem to be a problem in Palo Alto. You see that e.g. on the fact that a lot of parked bikes have bike helmets hanging on them, but the helmets are not locked or so. In the swimming pool in the Rinconada Park is no way to lock your belongings. Also at night, e.g. on the way back from a pub, Palo Alto doesn't feel unsafe. It may be different in South Palo Alto, but I have never been there and I also don't really know where it is. It is probably somewhere in the South, but I am a bit south, too. Mountain View is not that far away by bike. I checked because I will go to the Computer History Museum eventually. I have to see which is bigger and better. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View or the Nixdorf Computer History Museum in Paderborn.

Back to crime: San Francisco feels totally different. I was there on Tuesday and on the bus back to the train station, there was an issue in an Fast Food restaurant near Market Street with four police cars and medical emergency vans. 

A lot of people say that Palo Alto is boring and San Francisco, normally only called "The City" here is the place to life. But I think I prefer Palo Alto. On the other hand, the crime map doesn't really look empty. 

The shared house has no TV. I feel to miss out on an important part of American Culture. I look more U.S. movies and TV shows at home than here.

To the internship: A few thoughts.

The internship is a large, practical "experiment/test" on multiple issues: Do I want to get a job in Silicon Valley? Can I imagine living here for years? Do I want to work for that concrete company afterwards? Do I want to be go into "real" engineering (currently the most probable answer, but we will see. Nothing is decided yet), a company research department which a lot of storage companies have, or stay in Academia?

I failed to do an internship earlier. I should have done that 5-6 years ago. The time at arvato systems was good and very helpful, the paycheck was nice, but in retrospect I left a year too late. The stuff I worked there on is to different that it is not helping me now from a resume point of view. So maybe some companies fail to see a proof that I actually can develop stuff. I think I can develop interesting stuff. I think I proofed that before, but not in a visible, normal way. But the internship should help proofing that. I mean some companies where I applied for the internship didn't even bothered to answer, not even a negative response. This should not happen when I search a job after the PhD. Well, probably I will not apply at these companies anyway. 

I found it always stupid in Germany that you have to send (sometimes, e.g. at the Uni Mainz also officially signed) copies of all certificates directly at the beginning of a job application. IMHO, it shows a huge mistrust on the applicant. This is not the case at all U.S. based companies where I applied up to now. Which are basically one company twice and half a dozen or so for the internship. The big BUT here: the company hired a kind of private detective company to check my education background. This seems to be the normal procedure. This feels like a higher mistrust than the German way. If the alternative is external background scanning, I prefer the German way. Is this usual in U.S. tech companies? Why are these things done for an internship position, but not for CEOs? How to these screening companies find out anything? I think that the University of Paderborn would not be allowed to answer any information requests by such a company under German privacy laws.

The first days I read tons of design documents on the database. It took a few days to get the laptop and a few more days to get access to the Wiki, source code repository, and all the other good stuff that belong to a good development process. Now it can start.

I meet another Uni Paderborn alumni at the company. He is working on machine learning on top of the database. I think, it is really nice to see people from the same university a few thousands miles westwards, working in the same "small" company. 

The internship was a big bet on the fact that developing on the database access/storage layer is not really that different from other software-intensive storage or file systems. That seems to the true.

I have read on the Internet that at the company, there is something free to eat "three times". I thought that it is nice that you can also have breakfast there. What was meant was, three times a week, not three times a day. There is no staff restaurant. But there is a sandwich store in the office building. I was a bit surprised at first, but the company has grown so much in the last year and a staff restaurant, with real lunch, is really not on the priority list right now. On the other hand, a software development company in Munich that I "visited" last year has a free staff restaurant for only 50 staff members at that office. But you cannot really compare that.

My boss worked on deduplication before: In a discussion about a specific data structure, she said that they used it a lot at the other department for their deduplication. Yes, I know. I have read the paper dozen of times.