Interning @ Yahoo!

A bit of background first: I joined Yahoo!  Bangalore in May for a 10 weeks summer vacation internship. And my first industry experience.

So: what did I work on? Stuff that involved extensive use of a keyboard, monitor (2 in fact) and a touchpad (occasionally even a mouse). Apart from that, I'm not sure what I'm allowed to speak about, so to avoid any unnecessary complications, I'll leave it at that.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we. Day zero: Go and see the Y! building from outside. Getting into the business park was a bit difficult, so didn't try venturing into the building itself. Day one: Arrive at 8.30 in the morning, wondering what I'll be doing. Completely dressed up in formals, of course. I mean, which company doesn't expect shirts, trousers and black shoes? A lot of them, apparently. Including Y!.

9.30: My introduction to Y! . A 2 hour presentation followed by an intro to my team. I am completely amazed by the office -- themes for each floor; Cafe Coffee Day machines on every corner; neat and clean cubicles. Even better than what I'd expected after having seen the Adobe office in Delhi during India's first WordCamp.  My computer wasn't quite ready yet, so I was given a quick introduction to search engines, the structure, etc. by my Team Leader and Manager. Which, in itself, was pretty cool. My computer was set up by the end of the day, but getting it to run was a pretty big problem without support.

Finally, near the end of the day -- it was working. I quickly set up/was helped in setting up my email, Cube No., etc etc. And customizing my desktop. So I was set to reading about a lot of stuff maintained by Y!, which I would be working on. And this kind of went on for the first week -- orientation, reading up a lot of stuff, presentations and clarifications by my team leader; and I click my way through to Friday, setting up a dev environment (customizing Vim, etc.) and so on.

Come Friday, and my team's changed. Which was a bit strange -- but there wasn't anything I could have managed to do wrong by then, so I wasn't that worried. And I probably shouldn't have been, from what I've seen of Y!. ( Y! is so much easier to type than any pronouns, or the company name.)

Week 2: I'm introduced to my new Manager and Team Leader -- my computer's still the same till now. And then I start reading up on new stuff that I'll be using/working on. Re-run 1st week, with a different context. Oh, and I also move to a laptop; as the desktop hasn't been removed yet, I start using both the Desktop's huge monitor and my laptop's average one together. The downside to a laptop -- I'm stuck with Windows; the up-side? I can carry it to conferences and all. And finally, near the end of the week, I'm told about what I'll be working on. Something or the other.

Week 3 onwards is kind of a blur -- I walk into office anywhere between 8 and 11, stay till anywhere between 1 and 3 (am), learn a lot -- both related to computers and pool -- annoy my team leader with strange questions related to the environment I'm working in. And have fun. Weekends are spent crawling around malls looking for books (Landmark being my favourite), having iced coffee at Gloria Jeans Coffee -- and wondering about the requirement of weekends in general for certain kinds of jobs. Occasionally I would be bored enough to walk into office, get some work done, play some pool. Also joined the gym during this time, and kept a goatee. And a moustache.

Somewhere around the middle, I gave my first presentation. I even spent half the night photoshopping 2 flickr images to make a nice image for my debugging tool. It was during this time that I started walking into office at around 10 and leaving anywhere between 1 and 3 am.

I distinctly remember the first night I spent at office. I had initially planned to leave at 11, as I needed some help from someone across timezones. By the time I was ready to catch a cab, it was pouring heavily; and the solitary cab that had managed to reach the office was already overcrowded -- I turned, went to the Cafe, bought a Red Bull (my first) and marched back to my cube. And worked till 3 am. Followed by 2 hours of pool with some other insomniacs (and people who had come back from home 'cause of power cuts). And then some more work till 7 am. After which I caught an auto home.

I spent 1 or 2 more nights at office after that day. There always used to be a few people around. The longest I stayed at office was some 30 hours or so -- during the hack day. I brought along a change of clothes, a towel and other toiletries -- stayed up throughout the night, worked on my hack (http://kunal-b.in/Tangent2) and had more concentrated doses of caffeine than I had probably ever had before. I'm sad to say that my hack bombed and didn't even reach the top 40, but it was an interesting experience.

Life went on, office, various malls et al. Landmark, novels and comics being my primary source of entertainment.

Perhaps too soon, I reached the end of my intern. I gave my final presentation -- which was well received (or I hope it was) -- and spent a week adding a bit more stuff to the final part of my project and handing over whatever I had done to a FTE Y!. And then, back.

After such a long, stream of consciousness typish post, a short summary: Went to Y!, set up camp in office, had fun, did some work, made quite a few friends, played pool and came back to college (but didn't want to).