thehowe_v7.1

In case there's anybody who reads this that I don't talk to on a regular basis, I've got big news for you: A year from now I'll be a full-time Software Development Engineer at Microsoft. I'll be working with the Terminal Services team, the same team that I interned with during the summer.

There were many factors that weighed in my decision to go to Microsoft: the pay is good, the benefits are some of the best in the country, I love the Seattle area, and the team I'm on works on cool stuff. In the end, it came down to the fact that Microsoft works on more things that I find interesting than any other software company.

Today at work I was putting together a presentation for a talk I'm giving tomorrow on the project I've been working on for the first half of my internship. Put simply, I added some functionality and a new user interface to an existing application.

Of course, that's not how my twisted brain thought about it. I started envisioning the code as the torso of a person, and the original interface as the head. In this analogy, my extensions would be like a cancerous mutant second head sprouting from the shoulder, with its tendrils extending down into the torso. It'd be all twisted and weird, and it'd always be drooling and chewing on the main head's hair. It'd have like five teeth and one eye would be bigger than the other.

I was this close to using the analogy.

As usual, I've been lax in updating during the summer months. I'm interning out at Microsoft this summer, out in Redmond, WA. I have to say, I'm really enjoying the experience. I was a little worried coming in, because the team I'm working for... well, let's just say their product isn't the most exciting in the world. Luckily, my project has turned out to be very cool. I can't really talk much about it, so I guess you'll have to take my word on it.

Another change for me this summer has been getting out to do more hiking. So far I've only been able to get out two weekends, but I've really enjoyed myself both times, so I'm planning on getting out as many weekends as I can before I leave.

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.