thehowe_v7.1

I don't think I've mentioned it here yet: I'm going to be interning at Microsoft this summer instead of back to Amazon for a third summer. Since I put some time and sincere thought into it, I thought I'd post the email that I wrote to my Amazon contact:

Hi (Name Removed),

I'm writing to let you know that I interviewed & got an internship offer from Microsoft for this summer, and I've decided to accept.

I thought a long time about this decision, and it was not an easy one to make. If I were making a decision for full-time employment, there's no doubt in my mind that I'd come back to Amazon: I've had a great time, learned a lot, and worked with some fantastic people over the last two summers. I know that if I were to come back to Amazon I would have a lot of fun and work on very satisfying, interesting problems. However, I feel like internships should be more about gaining a broad set of technical and professional experiences, and I feel that Microsoft will be more valuable in that regard than coming back to Amazon for a third summer would be.

I'm currently planning on graduating with my Master's in April '08, and I definitely hope to be in contact with you more then to discuss the possibility of coming to Amazon full-time.

Thanks for everything,
Travis

The Amazon folks, of course, understood. This decision wasn't about not wanting to go back to Amazon. I made the decision because ultimately I believe that spending a summer at Microsoft is going to be the right thing for me to do, both professionally and educationally.

Well, it's been a while, so I thought I'd put something here. It's been a great summer working for S3, and I've still got about a month to go. Today was the company picnic, which was OK. Free food and free beer are always a plus.

I start grad school in a little over a month, and I still haven't registered for classes. I should probably get on that. I've been avoiding thinking about school until August, so I guess I can put that off for a few more days. I should also probably start thinking about the research job I've got lined up.

I've been working a lot with Ruby on Rails this summer, and I've gotten a lot of good ideas for ways to redesign the backend of the site to be more maintainable and easier to change, so I may implement some of those in the future. I think first I need to get around installing a proper linux distro onto a virtual machine on my laptop, so I can actually test the php code real-time.

Anyways, Venture Bros. is finishing up, so that's probably enough for now.

Well, tonight is my last night in the house in Ann Arbor. Tomorrow afternoon I head home with the parents and then on Saturday it's off to Seattle for 16 weeks. I don't remember how much detail I went into last time, so I'll talk a little more about what I'll be doing this summer. I'm working in the Web Services group, specifically with the S3 (Simple Storage Service) team. I'm really excited about this opportunity - Web Services is kind of a big deal with this whole "Web 2.0" thing, and I think that they open up some really interesting possibilities to programmers.

Anyways, I probably won't post again whilst I'm on dial-up, and then it'll probably take a week or so to get situated in Seattle, so it'll probably be a while.

Well, my path for the next 1.5 years has been set. This summer I'm going back to Amazon as an intern in the Web Services group. Web Services is a big part of the "Web 2.0" movement, and is a fairly exciting area in the world of web programming these days. Definitely exciting stuff.

Also, although it's not officially official, I've been accepted to the U of M CSE Master's program, so I'm happy about that. It's only a three semester program, which I think is a happy medium between getting in more good classes and not being in school too much longer. Like I said, I'm waiting on the official notification from the School of Graduate Studies, but my department accepted me, so as I understand it it's essentially a done deal.

Probably next week I'm going to have to decide where I want to work next summer. I've got offers from both Amazon (again) and EA Games. Both would be really awesome jobs, so I'm going to have quite a decision on my hands. Amazon is one of the leading online technology businesses in the world, and EA is one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. At Amazon I'd be working near people I know in a city I love; at EA I'd be working with the people who made Command & Conquer in offices on the beach.

This is one of those hard decisions that it's nice to have to make.

It's been awhile; life's been busy. The project cycle has been pretty vicious this semester, and when you add in the stupid busy work from non-engineering classes, I've been kept pretty busy. Deadlines for applying to grad school are coming up in a few months, so I should probably start working on that. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did get a job offer from Amazon. A very generous offer. So that was nice. Even though I'm doing grad school, the job offer extends into an automatic internship offer, so I'm pretty well set for this summer, which is also nice.

News from home: apparently OE is doing exceptionally well in football this year. I don't really know all the specifics (my eyes kind of glaze over when people try to tell them to me), but apparently this team is the best in at least a decade, which is pretty cool. On a sadder note, apparently some kid in Troy's class commited suicide. I guess Troy sat next to him in classes the day he died, so he had a really tough time with that.

What else... I saw Dahlke a few weeks ago! He was in A² for a checkup, so we caught up over lunch. A big article appeared about him in a medical journal a few months back, which was neat. Apparently his cancer treatments were really experimental, and kind of a big deal, which I wasn't aware of. On a more selfish note, I also learned that I'm even more pathetic than I was previously aware of: apparently Loren Hunt has a girlfriend at Alma. The fact that Loren is now socially more successful than me is really pretty pathetic.

Moving on... work on the new website is progressing nicely, despite my lack of free time. It's currently about two-thirds of the way complete, with only the photoalbum, "about me" page, and some administrative stuff for me to finish. I expect I'll be cycling the links on the thehowe.com front page sometime early next month. At that point I'll also be shutting down the blog replies functionality on v5.0, since some of the changes I'm making for v6.0 have broken the old code.

I've been told that I don't post often enough to satisfy my out-of-school-yet-jobless contemporaries (i.e. Tom). This is a natural consequence of having the TV and my computer in two separate rooms this year. The internet is an excellent window into reality, but the TV is a portal to the magical world of the imagination. When it comes down to a choice I'm going to choose the TV because, let's face it, my life is boring as hell - which brings us to the second reason I haven't been posting. Unless you'd like to hear about my troubles installing graphics libraries for 487 or how cool function pointers are in C, I really don't have all that much to talk about.

That all being said, I actually do have a fair amount of news. Amazon has formally extended me a job offer for after this year. I'll get more details from them at the career fair next week, but I'm pretty much set on sticking around for a Master's degree.

Living in the house has been going well. Brock's been on an exercise streak since his girlfriend broke up with him, so I've been tagging along with him to the pool to get some laps in whenever possible. Eric keeps on buying cheap meat whenever we go to the store, so he keeps on having to cook it before it goes bad, so I've had some breaks from frozen dinners. On the downside, he likes to use lard in his cooking. Frequently. So, I try not to eat his food too often. We were supposed to have another Eric living with us, but he didn't come back to Michigan this year. We're in the middle of trying to get him to pay us - hopefully all will end well in that regard.

Classes have been busy but manageable. Despite the fact that I'm taking two absolute blow-off classes (Cultural Anthropology 101 and Astronomy 102), this semester is shaping up to be my busiest one yet. That's due to my two EECS classes, 487 (Intro to Graphics), and 381 (Advanced and Object Oriented Programming), both of which have a pretty heavy workload. As a nice surprise this semester it turns out I'm in the same Astro 102 lecture as Gracie Byrnes, so that's good. It's nice to have an attractive female actually happy to see me again - that hasn't happened since Ashley visited me in Seattle. Well, Jess did stop by to see me on her way to Northern before school started, but she's basically like my little sister, so that doesn't count.

As promised, my "farewell" email, entitled: 'So long, and thanks for all the fish':

All,

Today was my last day at Amazon, and I wanted to take a moment and thank you all for the help / advice / wry comments you have given me during my time here.

If the mark of a successful internship is how much I learned, then my time here has been a huge success. I've learned new languages (in the case of Perl, learned to hate), learned new technologies (some of which even exist outside of Amazon), and absorbed volumes of "Real World" corporate programming culture. I've seen a [REMOVED], a major [REMOVED], and our group's move to [REMOVED] has been 3 months away since I got here.

Coming from a family of teachers, I think that the culture absorption will end up being the most valuable knowledge I take away from here. I've gained a baseline against which I'll measure all opportunities in the future, and I've come to realize what is important to me in a work environment and what isn't.

Again, I'd like to thank you all for the part you played in my time at Amazon. The technical details I could have learned elsewhere, but it's because of the people I interacted with that I gained so much culture knowledge and had fun doing it.

-Travis

Okay, I admit it; at least two of those censored blocks were completely unecessary. What can I say, it makes me feel more important.

...[REMOVED]

Well, I'm home from Seattle. The experience as a whole was an overwhelmingly positive one. I'll post a good-bye email I sent in a few minutes. Now I'm just spending a few weeks relaxing at home before I head down to Ann Arbor.

I've got a new webpage in the works - something that I hope will make me a little bit of cash on the side. While I was at Amazon I worked a lot with their webservices, and they've actually got a really powerful set of tools available. So, I'm using that to make a comic book/graphic novel store. I'll only get between 5 and 15 percent of any sales, but it's not costing me a cent. So, if I can get some traffic, I win. There are actually some interesting problems - there's a one-request-per-second rule, and I can only do a limited set of actions in one webservice request, so I get to do some interesting caching and data manipulation on my end - but I have to work around limits on how long I can keep data in cache, which varies depending on what I'm storing. Like I said, an interesting set of problems.

But anyways, that'll probably be keeping me busy for the next couple of months or so. I've got a backlog now of about three other big projects besides the comic shop, so don't expect any major site updates anytime soon.

So, it occurred to me that I hadn't updated in awhile. I'd say I haven't done anything, but that wouldn't be strictly true. Last weekend my parents flew into town for the weekend to visit. On Saturday we drove about two hours north to a little port called Anacortes or something like that, and took a ferry out onto one of the islands off the coast and did a 5-hour sea kayaking excursion. It was a lot of fun - perfect weather, saw lots of wildlife (harbor seals, various starfish and jellyfish, even some orcas in the distance), and it was a hell of a lot easier than canoing.

After we drove back Saturday night, we got up Sunday morning and went on a 4+ hour hike at Tiger Mountain just outside of Seattle. It was a beautiful hike - awesome forest, a pretty damn rough hike. We gained roughly 2500 feet of elevation in about 2.4 miles - but over half of that (1300 feet) was in the last approx. 0.8 miles. Needless to say, it was pretty damn steep. We had some great views of the city and the surrounding mountains at the top, after which we took a slightly easier (but longer) trail down. My legs were sore as hell at the end, but it was worth it.

After the hike we came back to the apartment, showered, went out to dinner, and then went and saw Batman Begins at the local theatre. It was the best Batman movie ever. The villain wasn't the coolest (nobody beats Jack Nicholson as Joker), but it was the best representation of Batman I've ever seen on screen. I may even go see it again this weekend - we'll see.

What else... not too much going on this week. My project at work is progressing nicely, and it's been getting more satisfying as I get deeper into it. We've got an Intern rafting trip this Friday, so that should be fun. In about two weeks, on the 6th, Ashley is flying out to visit for a few days, so that should be a blast. I'll have to figure out what we're going to do, though. Going up in the Space Needle is a given, but beyond that there doesn't seem to be too much to do in Seattle. Ah well, I'm sure I'll think of something.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I added a PhotoAlbum to the site, which is updated with what few pictures I've taken this summer. Enjoy.