Third week

Ok, this post was started as the post for the second week. But then the time ran out and it was again the next weekend. So it is the week three post.

3 people from the shared apartment left this week. While that is definitely bad, it has its pros: The house is not over-full anymore. New people will arrive eventually, but still no CS people. Strange, I expected to meet some more here. On the other hand the mixture in the house is nice: Sociology, Eduction Science, Physics, Philosophy, and Biology. Update: The new people actually arrived. Two law students.

Here is a picture of the (old) group:

(Used with permission of L.B.).

The last week was filled with work, and BBQ. One BBQ as a farewell party, once because good friends from Germany visited me.

At work: After the relative boredom of the first week, I am now doing something: Designing and prototyping. Deep in my conform zone. It is pretty much like grad school. I think I have a nice system design for the problem. But in the next weeks, let's hope that we can get me out of my comfort zone a bit. I am not in the US to stay in my comfort zone.

On the second weekend, we were in a club in Palo Alto (nice, but it closed as early as two) on Friday. On Saturday, we were in the Mission in "The City". I still don't feel that this part of SF will ever be something were I well comfortable. Too dark, too dirty. The StreetView link is actually the nicest and cleanest place because it is directly at the BART station. On Sunday, I needed a day off, a day of solitude. To took my car and drove a large round. To Half Moon Bay, over Highway 1 (also called Pacific Costal Highway) to Santa Cruz, and then back to Palo Alto. It was really a nice trip.

Here is a picture of a nice place between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz:

This weekend was also really nice. Did I mention the always nice, but not to warm weather with 20-25 degrees?

I have seen the Champions League finals at an fraternity house on the Campus. Free beer and free pizza. :-) 

Today started with a challenge: Biking from Palo Alto to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View without seeing a Google office building. Please, see this map to visualize how big that challenge was. I failed that challenge. Probably it is not even possible, but furthermore I got lost and drove to the next white building because the museum is also in a white building, but that was no the museum…. In the end it is a 5-mile bicycle ride, directly following the bay shore line.

The museum, which I reached eventually, was really, really nice. It pays off that nearly every company within 30 miles contributed a lot in money and exhibition stuff from their basements. For example, the storage system room, which e.g. presents a IBM RAMDAC, was partly sponsored by XIVs Moshue Yanai. The fully functionally Baddage machine was also nice. It doesn't seem to be larger then the Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, but certainly has the more interesting artifacts.

After being back, we drove (and then hiked) to "The Dish" to see the partial solar eclipse that should happen today. The dish is a 150 feet radio telescope, located in the hills behind the campus. However, we haven't seen the solar eclipse. But the area is really, really nice. It is actually a very popular running site.

Here are more pictures of today:

Palo Alto

There are other nice, mixed (non published) pictures:

PaloAltoMixedPictures

Next weekend is fully planned. We go hiking on Saturday and see the baseball game Stanford Cardinals vs. UC Berkeley on Sunday. I don't unterstand baseball. Well, that is not totally right. I understand that is mainly about beer and hotdogs.

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.