California: June

I have been in Mountain View, CA for 2 weeks now. The internship at Google has been going well. The basic time line has been as follows:

• I arrived in Mountain View on May 31st.
• My first day at Google was Jun 2nd.
• They did “on-boarding” for most of that week. Which was kinda painful at times, but I did learn a lot about how Google works.
• On Friday I finally got a chance to start to do a little real work and I started to figure out what project I would be doing. More on that below.
• The next week (last week) I had only one class I had to attend so I finally started to get real amounts of work done.

I’ve been meeting lots of good people both at Google and from my housemate Dave’s social group. There are board games every Tuesday night and dinner and movies every Saturday, so I have not been suffering from lack of socialization which has been nice (it keeps Arthur from getting even more crazy). Yesterday I went on a hike with a bunch of Google interns. It was fun though the group was a bit too big and for some reason everyone wanted to walk really fast, so I ended up at the very back keeping track of the stragglers and taking pictures. The stragglers where actually a really fun group of people it turned out.

The hike was to the beach at Reyes Point (click the link to see a map of our route). It was a really nice hike (though longer than I expected). I got some good pictures and even a couple panoramas. I also met several really good people and chatted about all sort of nerdy things (these are Google interns after all).

My Google project is related to type checking Python code. I probably shouldn’t go into too much detail online since I don’t know what is secret and what isn’t, but I know I can tell you about the code that is open-source already. I have been working with PyTypeDecl and a metacyclic Python bytecode interpreter called Byterun. It’s been quite interesting and I think the I will be proud of the results.

So overall California is treating me well. Tomorrow I will be back to work and trying to push forward with my plan of action. And trying not to eat too many snacks. Oh, that reminds me. As some of you I’m sure know, Google has free food all over the place. They have cafes all over campus that are all free (for Googlers), and they actually produce very good food. I mean not everything is great, but it’s better than most of the $5 lunches I could get around UT. Also they have kitchenettes on each floor which have a lot of snacks and tea and stuff like that. I guess their theory is a well fed programmer is a productive programmer. I don’t mind being pampered a bit, but the chocolate they have is good enough to be really dangerous. ;-)

Posted in Grad School, Life (other than code), Programming Theory, Travel