August 13, 2009

Eight weeks went by very quickly at ezRez.  I do not feel like I was able to learn all of the finer points of this complex company, but I was able to build an appreciation for the amount of work each day that goes in to making their product a reality.  Moreover, I was surprised with myself and the amount I was able to learn and accomplish in such a short period of time.  When the project I was given was first presented to me I did not believe that my co-intern, Leanne, and I would be able to even make a dent in its scope by the end of our time at ezRez.  Yet, in perhaps my happiest moment of miscalculation, Leanne and I were able to present our all but completed and fully-functioning project on our final day of work as the hosts of the weekly engineering seminar.  Our fellow developers were nothing short of stunned by our product and its current state of completion.  The project to which I am referring is a web tool for searching, viewing, and editing major database information on the ezRez servers.  It was designed primarily to search for and correct any faulty data in the database.  This tool will be used on an everyday basis by customers and developers at ezRez once it is launched in a few weeks.  I would have liked to provide a link to the page to allow the readers of this blog to view the tool, but it enables editing of sensitive data and therefore requires the secure login of an ezRez agent.  This single page is the synthesis of more than 35 programming files and a few thousand lines of code, written in no less than 10 different programming languages.  I cannot thank enough the organizers of the CU In program and the employees of ezRez itself for the invaluable experience and enjoyment that I have gained from working on this project at ezRez.

 

Ghirardelli Factory Golden Gate Bridge

Lombard Street

 

Outside of work, I also did a significant amount of sightseeing during my last few weekends in San Francisco.  I visited Fisherman's Wharf (and had a delicious burger at In N' Out), the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz to name a few.  I have included several pictures.  My favorite experience had to be Alcatraz.  You are ferried over to the island in about ten minutes and quickly given some ground rules about the island.  After this, everyone is ushered up to the cell house where you are equipped with an audio tour headset and set free to move around at your own pace.  I found myself frequently stopping the audio and investigating different areas a little further.  The day I went the recreation yard was open and tourists were allowed out to look around.  From atop the concrete bleachers at the near side of the yard one can find one of the best views imaginable of the San Francisco skyline.  The inmates lucky enough to have yard privileges were tormented each weekend day with a breathtaking view of one of the world's most beautiful cities and the harsh reality that they would not be able to appreciate anything it had to offer for a very long time.

 View from the yard in AlcatrazAlcatraz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Looking back at my time in San Francisco and at ezRez, I think I most enjoyed interacting with and learning from the experienced developers and furthering my knowledge of the field of computer science.  I have never been surer that software development is the correct career path for me.  I now realize that the skills I will need to be successful in the job place are not the same as those I need to have success in academia, but I believe there is time and purpose for both.  As I look forward to more internships and more classes, what I have learned only inspires me to learn even more about each.

July 24, 2009
Final go/no go decision
I now wish more than ever that this internship had been a little longer.  After all of the training and research and small assignments, I am finally working on a large-scale company project of high importance and coming to the realization that I will not have enough time to complete it.  The focal point of company work over the last couple of weeks has not been the search location project on which my co-intern, Leanne, and I have been working, but instead on the new software release that just happened last night.  All of the developers have completely devoted their time to fixing problems and bugs that have popped up with the new release.  From what I am told this practice is not unusual. Major releases, such as this one, occur usually three times per year and are always a big deal.  This one, especially, contained a lot of new features and components, so when the software entered the testing phase last week, it was not a matter of if problems would arise, but when.  Several hundred bugs have been fixed over the last few Big board of bugsweeks, but even then one can say with certainty that more will crop up in the wake of the deployment.  For this reason, a minor release is always scheduled a week after a major one. So I have that to look forward to next week.  Release night itself was a fun experience.  A crew of us came in and worked 10pm-6am trying to get the software up and running and functioning smoothly.  The office was abuzz with hurried bug fixes and last minute decisions.  A projector displayed all of the open bugs in giant text upon the wall, and, at 2:30 AM Pacific Time, the decision by committee was made to finalize the release.  This is most likely an experience I will become well accustomed to once I enter the real-world of computer science.

Despite the franticness of release time, Leanne and I have remained largely isolated from its effects.  We cannot be assigned bugs as they take a little more experience than either of us have to solve on the sort of time schedule the company has been dealing with for this release.  Instead, we have continued on with creating online database-editing tools for ezRez agents to be able edit any search location tables they might need to through a simple user-interface.  The reasoning behind this undertaking is the company's recent push to internationalize.  A large East Asian airline company called Air Asia just signed with ezRez and more are on the way, so the need for a multi-lingual and readily-editable database is greater than ever, though long overdue at any rate.  The experience has been extremely informative and very interesting, but not without its headaches.  This is the first work I have done with material that will actually be displayed on the website.  No longer is functionality the only consideration, but aesthetics and user-friendliness take on similar importance.  From what I have seen so far, these can be exponentially more complicated.

As for my tourist activities of late, I am starting to realize that my time here is running out and I may not be able to do as much as I had originally hoped.  The bay area has such a wealth of opportunity that even an eight-week stay cannot do it justice, especially one in which I am working five days a week.  I spent a fair amount of time in San Francisco last weekend and I have included some pictures from that trip.  I discovered the beautiful Delores Park.  The panoramic views from its highest point are undoubtedly the most breathtaking I have gotten of the city yet.  Parks in San Francisco, unlike New York, are very wide open and people mostly just go to relax and take in some sun.  It looks more like a beach scene than that of a traditional park.  Vendors walk around with ice cream and beverages while people sprawl out on towels or play Frisbee or kick around a soccer ball.  Beyond the park scene, I did quite a bit of walking around the city itself.  I ran into several pretty, old churches and the San Francisco mint and traversed some characteristically-hilly San Francisco streets.  I have a lot planned for the next two weeks as well and right now I can only hope that there will be enough time to get to all of it.

My friend mike and hilly SF street we were walking alongBreathtaking view atop Delores Park

Beautiful old church in San Francisco

July 10, 2009 Postcard Row

California is truly amazing.  I am approaching the one month mark and there has yet to be a single day of rain.  It's considered "bad out" here if there is anything more than a passing cloud.  I feel guilty spending a minute relaxing indoors when it's so beautiful outside.  I brought one light jacket and one sweatshirt on the trip with me, but I scarcely need anything more than a t-shirt.  The weather has enabled me to explore a lot of the area.  San Francisco and Berkeley, however, are such culturally rich and diverse locations that I feel I have still yet to scratch the surface of what they have to offer.  I spent some time in the Mission District, which I found to have a lot of great Mexican and Italian food.  I spend most of my time near Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, which is always very busy with foot traffic from UC Berkeley students.  

Last week I met my alumni mentor, Stephanie Haigo, for dinner in the Mission.  She was away on business for the alumni event a few weeks ago so we decided to meet up then instead.  We had some amaziAsian Art Museumng spinach and mozzarella pizza at a place called Little Star Pizza on 17^th street.  In the three short years she has been out of school, Steph has moved a great distance twice for work.  Once to her parents country of Japan for a marketing position and once to start a consulting job here in San Francisco.  She, along with her coworker (an engineer like myself), had some fascinating and yet daunting stories about the horrors of finding their own in today's job market.  I hope I can learn from some of the things that they told me and, moreover, I have a newfound gratitude for the buffer zone that Columbia is currently providing me from the chaos of the real world. 

I took in San Francisco's fireworks display last weekend from the lofty perch of Alamo Square Park.  San Francisco has a very unique show.  There are three simultaneous displays shot off in the Bay with the exact same fireworks.  I would describe it as the July Fourth version of synchronized swimming.  I have definitely seen larger displays, but viewing thee at once was pretty amazing.  I have included a picture (my apologies for the quality, I was pretty far away).  I also visited the Metreon that same night.  The Metreon is kind of a techy-oriented mall with a huge movie theatre, arcade, and many food options.  It is definitely my kind of thing, though probably not for all.

Work has been a consistent learning process.  The past few weeks we have been working on learning the JavaScript scripting language and various frameworks that extend it such as Prototype and Scriptaculous.  These make user interface design of web pages much easier and more aesthetically pleasing.  It has been a very difficult, though interesting language to learn.  I have particularly enjoyed my work on ezrez's new search location project.  The goal is to completely change the way a destination from a search query is handled; obviously, a very central aspect of a travel site.  In the end, most likely the entire search algorithm will be rewritten or reworked.  My co-intern and I have primarily been assigned to map out how a search in handled by the ezrez system, from start to finish, so that the developing team may sit down with the knowledge of how it works now and the functionality they want in the end and determine how to implement it.  It has been very exciting and informative to start following a project from the very beginning.  The project will not be completed by the time my internship is over, but I am very interested to see the progress it makes over the next four weeks.

June 26, 2009 

My mom has often told stories of how great the bay area weather was when she spent time there after college, but never have they resonated more than during the two weeks before my flight to California for CUin when my hometown was plagued by perpetual rain.  I took often from Logan Airport amidst yet another such storm and six plus stop-less, yet meal-less hours later I was transported to what appeared to be a new world.  This world was sunny and 75 degrees, not just that day, but also every day in the two weeks since.  I have never before seen a ten day forecast that scarcely included so much as clouds let alone cold or raiSan Francisco Giants baseball gamen.  Weather, however, was the least of my considerations when applying to intern in California and instead has been a pleasant side effect.

The first couple of days at work I was hoping would never end.  As part of a very warm welcome, on Monday my fellow intern, Leanne, and I were taken out to lunch at a great Thai place called Tara a couple of blocks from the office.  I tried Thai iced tea for the first time, which I can report is delicious.  Work that day was confined to setting up our computers and creating accounts and logins for various services.  If that was not nice enough, on Wednesday we were treated to a San Francisco Giants baseball game complete with a gift card for free lunch.  We had the good fortune of seeing defending NL Cy Young winner Tim Linceum on the mound, albeit in a losing effort.  I would like to, but cannot claim all of the credit for this.  The office goes to a game once a year and it just so happened that it was planned for the same week we arrived.  A very nice treat my third day of work, though, to say the least.

As for the more paramount aspects of my trip thus far, I must admit my experience has been eye-opening and I mean that in the most positive way.  I walked into work the first day with the slight confidence that goes along with having two years of college computer science classes under my belt in preparation for my internship at ezrez Software.  Little did I know that the next two weeks would be completely dominated by researching and practicing all of the programming languages and skills, not taught in any college course, which will be pertinent to the rest of my summer.  As my colleagues were quick to explain, programming taught in an academic setting, though thorough from a theoretical standpoint, is limited to the classical programming languages like Java, C, and C++.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of present-day software development, including the travel software site I work for, is done for the internet.  Internet software cannot be made directly using any of these three languages, buFellow Columbia intern Leanne Pena (CC 2010)t must instead be done in one of dozens of different web development frameworks.  Without getting into too much boring detail, this basically translates to the necessity for the modern programmer to learn many more than the three classical academic languages and have the analytic skill to interact with and maintain a very complex code base.  In short, class has taught me how to think like a computer scientist, but thanks to the on-the-job skills that I am currently gaining, I will hopefully soon be able to code like one as well.

Beyond this extensive research and practice, I have also made some actual contributions to the development team at ezrez.  The company is in the midst of becoming PCI compliant, which a set of data safety frameworks enforced by most of the major credit card companies today to prevent fraud and identity theft.  My role has been to read though a lot of the legacy code in the ezrez code base in order to recognize and weed out specific types of data vulnerability.  I am actually taking part in the final stages of what has been a year-long effort to fix up the software before a group of testers come in this October to either grant or reject ezrez's request for PCI compliance certification.  Very few companies today can boast PCI compliance or another of comparable merit, as evidenced by the prevalence of fraud and identity theft on the internet today, which is why this project has been taken very seriously by ezrez.  Anyway, that is enough technical babble for a while.

Outside of work, the bay area has failed to disappoint.  I have yet to find a bad coffee shop, which is saying something since one can be found on virtually every street corner (sometimes two).  I started out safe with Starbucks, which is just as prevalent or more so here than it is in New York.  Since then, I have been leaning more toward local favorites like Peet's and Martha's.  I have had some time to do a little exploring and have found the Berkeley area particularly breathtaking.  If I had had a working camera before two days ago, I would share more images of the town in which I am staying.  The campus of UC Berkeley is immense and unbelievably diverse in both personnel and opportunity.  There are a lot of great restaurants, but I have been particularly pleased with the Thai and Mexican choices.  I will close this entry with a little about the alumni even this week.  First of all, it took place in a wonderful restaurant and brewery called Gordon Biersch located on The Embarcadero overlooking the bay.  This was my first real experience with alumni interaction, but I can honestly say it was both informative and a lot of fun.  Each person with whom I spoke had an abundance of stories to tell and advice to offer.  Moreover, they were all teeming with excitement over this program and had many words of encouragement for all of us.  If the event next year is held in the same location, I would highly recommend the strawberry lemonade.  Enjoy the few images I do have; I promise many more next time.