The most important things this weekend are packing and having farewells with everybody.
The internship is over.
In the end, it was a great time. Maybe one of the most interesting summers I ever had, certainly the one with the best weather.
Working for a database company worked out surprisingly well, given that I have no formal database background. My theory for this is that all software-intensive storage systems, where I would include data deduplication systems, distributed storage systems, and database storage layers, are driven by the media (usually hard disks, Flash storage). Whatever the user interface is, the way you design algorithms, how you try to make your IO pattern optimal, the basic building blocks for concurrency and fault tolerance are all the same. The basic skills (coding, data structures, design) of an engineer are the same. Therefore it doesn't really matter if the upper levels are SCSI or SQL. We are driven by the media.
It was great that my work was really appreciated. I worked on the design and the prototype of a novel storage layer and on test infrastructure as a side project. Both are topics I really like.
The last week was really helpful because multiple people including professional recruiters looked over my resume and gave line-edits. While my resume followed the U.S. style, it contains many formulations let recruiters trip. For example, I wrote "With Honors" as English transaction of "Mit Auszeichnung" (the highest grade we have), but "with honers" is the U.S. equivalent to "good" or even less. The resume is now in a much better shape. Otherwise the last week mainly consists of finishing the last pieces, handing over everything and painting the project name on a wall. Those who know me well, know that finding the name for the project was probably the most difficult task here.
The Bay Area is an awesome place. So many smart tech people. Literately everybody I spoke with about this had this favorite story about meeting somebody awesome and/or famous at a random place like a small book store. At work, there have been so many people with from these schools or these top companies or just tons of experience. Similar minded people who have to same attitude to coding/design or read the same professional books. It was interesting, I learned a lot, and I would like to work with these people or similar minded people again.
Also, there are so many interesting companies: The big ones, the middle ones, and the small ones. The change is high that if you have heard from a company or if you like like an app, it comes from within 30 miles from here. In the U.S. there is also the Seattle area and the Boston/Cambridge area, but still, here is it.
Have I mentioned the weather? Probably yes. Have I mentioned the great landscape here? Have I mentioned that in certain months you can go surfing in the Ocean and snowboarding at the same day?
I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do the internship. To do one was probably one of the best profession decisions I made. I can only recommend it. Well, I recommend it if you are similar to me. For a suit job like consulting or non-tech management, it is not worthwhile. Search a company you like, that does something interesting, something challenging and go for it.
The living situation has been strange, much stranger then what I could imagine. So strange that it is not an appropriate topic for a blog post. However, the room mates have been great. Totally diverse people from (in alphabetic order) a sociologist that programs C to do this simulations, over startup kids, a philosopher, a former CS guy who switched to law, a bio medical researcher whose love to ice cream is only surpassed by Camaros and Froyo, to a rowing, hyper-competitive law student. And more law students and even more people. But the group worked pretty well. We have done something interesting (like class-4 white water rafting last weekend) nearly ever weekend. I certainly would have left the house without these people. Some of them will eventually end up back in the Bay Area. Hopefully, we keep the contact.
Tomorrow I move to an airport hotel and on Tuesday at 6am my plane leaves to Frankfurt. Then: Back to normal.
I think I have a few nice photos left, but the camera is already stored away.
Books I have read during the internship:
- The Design of Design, Fred Brooks
- The Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena (I finally bought my own copy from my internship salary. It is necessary since I no longer have access to the decent University of Paderborn library)
- The Ph.D. Grind, Philip Guo (pdf)
- An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography, Hoffstein
- Quite, Susan Cain
- John Adams, David Mccullough
- Undaunted Courage, Ambrose
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