akrish

Today was my last day of my internship at VMware. If you don’t know what they do, definitely check them out; they are probably one of the coolest tech companies around. My internship experience was pretty amazing and I was surprised that I was kind of sad to leave work for the last time.

I think one of the things that I’ll miss the most is the people that I met, and the conversations that I had with them. Not only did we have technical conversations, on subjects ranging from startup ideas to computer architecture and AVL trees, but we talked about golf, foosball, movies, our homes, our schools, and pretty much everything else you can think of. After spending 12 weeks with the same people, seeing them every day (or every weekday), you end up becoming pretty good friends with them, and then all of sudden work ends and I may never see them again.

But on the other hand, now I have friends all over the US. I met people from North Carolina, New York (a lot from New York), Michigan, Minnesota, and of course other parts of California, and it’s cool because some of us may end up working or going to school in the same place and it would be pretty good to have someone I know wherever I end up.

And of course there was the technical part of my internship. I feel like I learned so much from the experience, but not necessarily about computer science. Rather, I learned what working for a company is like and how being a developer is very different from being a computer science student or researcher. I think there’s enough to talk about here that I’ll leave it for a future post. Actually I think there may be several more posts about my internship, as it was the single most significant thing about my summer.

Anyway, thanks a lot VMware (the company and all of the people that I met). The experience was amazing and I would love to be able to come back later on.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (courtesy of CalvinandHobbes.com)

I stumbled on this comic just now looking for a different Calvin and Hobbes strip that unfortunately I wasn’t able to find. But this comic reminded me of the good ol’ summers that I used to have when I was a kid when I would by dying of boredom and excited to go back to school (yes I was a nerd even then). The summers where I would sit around in the heat all day reading, watching tv, sweating. Where my friends and I would have water fights, go swimming, play sports and on the whole be spontaneous.

We used to have this tradition in elementary and middle school where after the last day of school my friends, my brother’s friends, my brother and I would all come to our house and have an intense water fight. We’d just run around my house with super soakers (which by the way seem to have changed a lot since I last had one), hoses and water balloons and we’d all be dripping and shivering after a couple of hours.

Since none of us could drive, during the days when our parents worked we weren’t able to hang out with each other so everyone got bored, but it was the best boredom one could imagine. There were no cares, no deadlines, no internships, no summer school, no applications and it was truly amazing.

I already wrote about what I’m doing this summer so I won’t really talk about here (you can read about it here though). But since high school, summer was about getting ahead in school, getting into college, and learning how to be an adult (i.e. working). In high school, I took classes, tutored, taught clarinet, tried to get a job, studied for SATs, worked on college applications and even though there was a lot more free time than during the school year, it wasn’t the same as the summers of elementary and middle school. And now in college, I’ve spent both my summers working full time for pretty much the entire summer because I’m supposed to get ready for adult life.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy these summers where I am doing things. In fact I think if I were given a couple of weeks with nothing to do, I’d probably spend most of it programming anyway. It’s just that I think I would like a couple of weeks with nothing to do, and then I’d have the ability to spend that time however I want (programming…) and it would be really relaxing. I also think the not being able to drive around would be interesting, because I’d get a lot more time to myself which I need every now and then (especially when I’m trying to relax).

So things have certainly changed, but I wouldn’t say for the worse. Now I’m able to take care of myself, I’m rarely ever bored during these summers, and I still have some time to play sports and hang out with my friends. It also really makes me enjoy the weekends.

On a random note. I used to read Calvin and Hobbes pretty religiously. I have a lot of the comic books at home and really like Watterson’s creativity. Calvin’s imagination is amazing and I really enjoy a lot of the adventures that he has. Also I find his philosophies and social commentaries pretty interesting. If you haven’t read much of this comic I highly recommend it.

This post is probably long overdue. Events took place in early June 2008…

After finishing my finals, I moved out of my house (someone is subletting my room) and pretty much immediately started working. In like my second week, I took Thursday and Friday off (no PTO) and my family and I headed out to Boston for my brother’s graduation (yes from college. I can barely believe it). The flight there was absolutely horrible… first of all we had a layover and that completely sucks and secondly our second flight got delayed because there was some storm somewhere I forget the details now. What’s even worse I don’t really like to be in really cramped spaces for long times. Not that I’m claustrophobic, I’m just really fidgety and move around a lot.

Anyway we landed at like midnight in Boston and only checked into our hotel/went to bed by like 2 and we were supposed to get to the graduation the next day at 7. So my dad says we’re all waking up at 6 and yada yada yada I was really tired the next day (except not like in Seinfeld). So the next day was Friday, and it looked pretty cloudy and we were kinda worried because the graduation was outdoors. We ended up getting there at like 8 and then my dad tells me that graduation doesn’t start until 10 and I was kinda pissed because I didn’t want to be sitting there for two hours. And then the rain started… And it poured for a good 30 minutes or so. Fortunately MIT was prepared and they provided ponchos for everyone so no one got wet, but it was amazing. I haven’t seen that much rain in a really long time (El nino, 4th grade to be precise) and I realized that living anywhere else is incredibly different from California.

So the graduation came and went, it was really nice to see my brother graduate and all that and I met some of the guys I interned with last summer and some other people I knew from MIT which was good. My dad took some pictures maybe I’ll put them up here sometime. We ended up hanging out as a family for the afternoon (brother included) and got food walked around the Prudential Center (it was still looking kinda crappy outside) and then my brother and his friends had organized a dinner with all the families so we went to that. The dinner was actually really fun, I met a couple of my brothers friends and got to talk to a lot of people from completely different backgrounds and experiences than mine or my families. Plus we had a lot of really good food (Maggiano’s family style… awesome).

The next day we didn’t really have anything planned so we just wandered around Boston/Cambridge and I got to see a lot of places I’d never seen before (this was my third trip to Boston but the other two I didn’t see that much). We wandered around Newberry Street (which I thought was really amazing, kind of like a downtown Palo Alto but like better in so many ways). We looked at an apartment my brother was trying to live in next year, walked through campus so I could see all the cs buildings (I thought they have a way bigger cs building than we do, but now that I think of it Soda is a lot bigger than it looks. At any rate the building is really nice with a gym and a cafeteria). Went into some of the other buildings and for the most part I really liked what I saw. We ate dinner at some pizza place on Newberry street that made a pretty good slice and that pretty much made my day.

My parents and I left pretty early the next morning and were back in time for an eventful Sunday (I don’t remember what events but just that it was eventful) and that was that. But for some reason I had a really good time on this trip. Maybe it was that I was completely carefree and didn’t worry about anything work related. But something made me really like Boston and the trip made me want to live on the East Coast even more than I already wanted to before. Granted California is awesome and I love it, but I think I need to get out of here for a little while and go somewhere else and recently that somewhere else has become Boston. So now I just have to get into grad school there… unfortunately that’s pretty tough.

Going to new york at the end of my internship and I’m pretty excited for that trip too. I recently realized that I really like travelling!

I guess this is the first day where I’m really going to experience summer in all it’s glory. We’re going to the beach! (and yes how sad is it that i live like 40 minutes from the beach and this will be my first trip this summer) It seems that now my friends and I are all so busy that we don’t ever hang out much during the day so we never get to enjoy these sort of one-day trips. But I’m really excited to go today.

Anyway that wasn’t really the point of the post. I wanted to talk about what I have been doing (not what I wish I’d been doing).

Summer has been ridiculously jam-packed but at the same time relaxing. I went on a trip to Boston to see my brother graduate which was really cool (and I’ll write about that later). Then I’ve been working pretty much full time at VMware which has so far been a really amazing experience. On top of that I’ve been exercising a lot (playing soccer, ultimate, running, and weight lifting) which has also been really fun because I’ve been doing it with my friends and co-workers.

But with all this going on, I haven’t really been just hanging out and relaxing with my friends like one is supposed to during summer. During the week I’m just too burnt out after each day and I pretty much come home and crash. And on the weekends I do hang out with my friends, but they’re all just as busy as I am, so it’s often hard to organize something like a beach trip.

And what’s more, I haven’t gotten around to a lot of school-related things that I also wanted to do. Like finishing up my research project from last semester, figuring out what classes I want to take (which I need to do because I sign up on Tuesday), or even just spending some time on a couple of programming projects that I’ve been meaning to do for awhile.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy with the way the summer is going. It’s been one of the best and most rewarding summers that I’ve had (except for the summer after high school because that was completely unbeatable). I’ve accomplished a lot, learned a lot and still managed to keep it pretty relaxing. And had I not been doing everything that I’m doing I’m sure I would be incredibly bored.

So summer’s coming to an end I guess. I have a couple of more weeks of work and then I may be heading to new york on vacation and then it’s back to school. But I’m kind of looking forward to school because it’ll be a good change from the routine of working. And I guess that’s what summer is supposed to do to you: It’s suppose to get you excited to go back to school, either by making you really bored and dying for things to do, or by keeping you so busy that you think school will be relaxing in comparison.

School starts in 5 days, and I’m really excited to move in and go back. Summer was really awesome, and for the first time in my life, I’m actually content enough with my summer to look forward to classes starting. These last couple of months have been jam packed with stuff for me to do; activities ranging from working, coding, and writing, to running, watching movies, and surfing. Looking back, this summer was not only fun, but it was also really productive.

Okay, boring stuff first. My summer was really productive. I had a full time internship where I learned so much (see What I learned at Tellme). Not only that, I started, finished, and worked on a lot of my own projects. I started this blog, which I’m happy to say I’ve maintained pretty well for the past month or so. I spent a lot of time thinking about design ideas for WeNote, which unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to actually carry out just because I don’t see much of a future in it. I wrote a lot of much smaller scripts that I’ve started using and on top of all of that, I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with everything involved in programming. The fact that I learned so much this summer really added to my overall experience and to be perfectly honest, made my summer complete.

Now that that’s out of the way, on to the fun stuff. So all the fun things I did: playing guitar, running, playing soccer (lots of soccer), playing basketball, watching movies, going swimming, going surfing, going to the beach, hanging out with friends, and meeting a lot of new people. Truly, all of my experiences this summer were incredible. I loved playing guitar with my friends whenever we got the chance. We played soccer so consistently throughout summer, but every pick-up game was fun, unique, and exhausting. I went surfing, for the first time, with some of my co-workers and it was amazing. Of course I enjoy spending time with my high-school friends, mini-golfing, getting dessert, or just hanging out; it’s always fun. Finally, I was really happy to meet so many new, cool people from work, from soccer, and from other really random places. Even though I didn’t do that much really interesting stuff, I definitely enjoyed all the not-so-interesting stuff that I did this summer.

Even with everything that I did, I still regret not doing anything really special. One of my friends just came back from hiking Half Dome in Yosemite, and she said it was an amazing, unforgettable experience. Apart from the surfing trip, a lot of my summer is pretty forgettable, regardless of how fun it was. And it wouldn’t have been difficult to plan a memorable experience, I was just too lazy or too preoccupied with everything else that was going on.

On the whole though, my summer was amazing. Still, good things need to come to an end, and I’m excited for school to start next week.