Internship with Yahoo! Completed
I have officially completed my internship with Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA for the summer and am back home in beautiful Jacksonville, FL. Overall I had an incredible experience and learned a ton. My eyes were opened to the large amount of tech start-ups and large companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. I got to see the office buildings of Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Altera, McAffee, WebEx, Facebook, Flock, and Meebo. You just can’t do that anywhere else. I always knew there was a Silicon Valley, but living in the area and rubbing shoulders with so many talented people in one area was a new experience for me.
I also got to work with talented engineers at Yahoo! and learn a lot. I was able to take a half dozen courses on various front-end engineering topics to either refine my skills or teach me new stuff while I was there. I was able to see what the workflow in a large organization (a company of 12,000 people) is like – the good and the bad – and work on projects for a company which impacts half of the world’s internet users every month. Yes, they are still more popular than MySpace.
Having intern events with nearly 200 other interns was fun too. It was great being able to meet and become good friends with a bunch of talented young people. Thanks to this crazy new toy called the “internet,” hopefully we will be able to stay in contact.
What now? Back to school and doing freelance work. I’ve got a decent school schedule this semester: Differential Equations honors, Applications of Discrete Structures, Circuits I, Java II, and Technical Writing for Engineers. I’ll be moving in my Gainesville apartment in about a week and will be building a loft for my tiny bedroom…. more on that later hopefully.
Freelance work is starting to come back on strong with a few programming projects starting up for designer friends. I just launched a new dynamic website for UF Campus Crusade. The site is a redesign of an aged site, now written with CSS and web standards in mind. While building upon the existing PHP backend, I have also added some new features and increased usability. I did not have time to do everything I wanted to on it this summer, but hopefully it will still serve as a great resource and advertising for the UF ministry of 300+ students.