postmortem i

not that i plan to make a postmortem ii anytime soon, but i imagine there’ll be lots of such posts in the near and far future

the last few weeks of work were more or less the same as in my previous post.. at least it’s over now 🙂 

• in week 8 i had my mid-internship demo/presentation and it went pretty well 🙂 got a lot of good feedback on software presentations which presumably is applicable to places other than amazon too. oh and i also had a bunch of 16-hour workdays including on weekends to get everything ready
• in week 9 i got a bunch of code submitted and the person overseeing my team took a bunch of vacation days so i couldn’t get any code reviewed -_- also realized the only thing i’d get out of working really hard is a return offer for an internship next year, which i’d almost certainly not take, so my motivation sort of collapsed for most of weeks 9 and 10
• in week 10 my team realized one of the features i was working on was useless so they assigned me to a different feature 😐 also discovered i could refer people for next year’s internships and then referred a bunch of friends
• in week 11 my mentor told me to focus on dealing with a certain potential race condition, which it turns out was already being dealt with by existing code, but he got moved to a different team so it was difficult getting his attention in general. oh well at least i learned a lot about good database design in the process 😛 also finally had a non-work conversation with my coworkers, though it still ended up being about a boring topic (their experiences getting amazon to reimburse furniture/alcohol/etc.. is this kind of thing all that people talk about at work?)
• so week 12 was supposed to be super chill because my final demo was scheduled for tuesday, after which i’d have the rest of the week to wrap up stuff + watch amazon videos + distract my team by chatting with them, but instead my demo got moved to thursday, meaning i actually had to stay on task for another 2 days and only chill for 1.5 days oof. i was legitimately just planning on watching leadership videos for the last few days of my internship but oh well. of course this gave me 2 extra days to prep for the demo but honestly i’d prefer not having those 2 days.  some other issues came up over my last week which made me realize a lot of my teammates are as intimidated by my manager as i am, and are clowning about as hard as myself on this job 😛 idk there are so many conflicts of interest in all these work relationships and at amazon your manager doesn’t check in on you that often (maybe every week as opposed to every day) so i guess this is expected

the demo ended up going well even though i got my code through the relevant pipelines literally 2 hours beforehand and only started actual prep ~30 minutes beforehand, which i’m pretty happy about; i think it was good practice for… something but i’m not sure what? my manager said he’d incline me for a return offer because i “acted reasonably for a first-year student” and i really cannot tell at all if this is a compliment or not; i still feel like i only did 4 weeks’ worth of actual work but apparently having offers is good for convincing other places to give you offers so i’m not complaining

anyway i still got to watch a good number of videos and gained a better appreciation of the more unique aspects of internal amazon culture in the process. the most interesting highlights for me were: 

• how self-cannibalization of services is encouraged eg. promoting online dvd rentals at the expense of revenue from hard-copy dvds. 
• asking people (eg. friends, employees) for better intentions after they mess something up doesn’t work because they likely already had good intentions to begin with. instead you need to create mechanisms that actually allow people to change their behavior more easily

its honestly pretty disappointing that i barely got to talk to my team and other interns but thats how virtual internships are i guess, and i think watching lots of videos on perspective was the best substitute available; given the age gap perspective was probably the only thing i could’ve gotten from my team members anyway? and i’m not super disappointed about not talking too much to other interns- i joined some music and basketball slack channels but apart from that the generic amazon software intern maybe isn’t someone i’d be particularly interested in meeting, but i guess i’ll never know now

everything looks rosier in hindsight but even factoring that out there’s not a lot i regret. i’m still of the opinion my work wasn’t particularly interesting, and there were weeks where i felt awful about my incompetence to the point that i had digestion and eating problems as well as days where i had to work from 10am-1am, but i learned a lot about software and the nature of work and i really do believe that “these are the days that must happen to you”

given my lack of other options and that i was able to do plenty of other interesting things this summer i think i’m ok with how everything went. i’d write about my experience in greater detail but don’t want to accidentally violate ndas (which honestly i don’t know if i’ve already done or not; not sure what their scope is) so this is all you’re getting

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other updates:

my body has finally gotten used to the 100 deg heat which means i can consistently run in 90-95 deg heat without sweating much 🙂 this is roughly the level i was at last summer, but after going to mit my heat tolerance dropped to ~80 for a while. unfortunately the sun is setting ~1 minute earlier per day so i have to keep running at slightly earlier times. i’ve also been trying to sing while running, which is an interesting exercise in breath control and have bumped into a good number of former classmates on runs but they’ve mostly all moved out to austin for ut so i guess that won’t be happening much anymore. there’s so many teachers and students and etc. that i could be talking to and i feel the occasional urge to, but

i’ve been wanting to read “you can’t go home again” though it’s pretty long and i probably won’t have time in the near future, so i’ll just leave a relevant quote- You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love”, back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

i ran some more sparc activities! the first one was on inspiration, which turned into a discussion of how to get things done, which i guess is not a bad thing. then a 24-hour ama, which was fun but not super active probably because i chose a weekday, and tomorrow an exploration of foreign music. helping out with sparc was definitely the most rewarding and validating part of summer, though my relationship with “applied rationality” is getting more complicated. i think i still believe that everything is okay if you think about it enough, almost by definition, and i often feel that way when i’m at sparc, but thinking about everything in the right frames is constantly getting harder

i read (the currently released parts of) sfp (strong female protagonist, a web cartoon, look it up) and liked it a lot! the main character was slightly annoying but it was a nice exploration of ethics and morality via exaggerated characters and situations

i attempted to speedrun bojack horseman, and i was successful for seasons 1 and 5.. but seasons 2, 3, 4, 6 were actually just masterpieces so i ended up not skipping much, not that i regret it. the way the show uses specific animals to help the audience understand certain characters works perfectly. idk what to say except that it handles everything it touches extremely well: existentialism, character development, relationships, depression, hedonism, etc. and a lot of the credits songs are great. if you only have the interest/time to watch one episode i’d recommend time’s arrow (s4e11, relatively free of context and spoilers, not hard to find online)

ive also been tuning in for the last 6 minutes of particularly interesting nba playoff games, which has been pretty entertaining. i think this is a fairly optimal method of watching games, and noteworthy plays from earlier in the game will show up on social media anyway

my schedule for next semester has been set! i was trying to find some cool fall jobs that i’d value over a semester of school but was unsuccessful. not that this was surprising; it’s pretty hard to convince a company to accommodate fall internships just for you and that’s essentially what i tried to do. so instead i’m taking classes again:

• 5.12 organic chemistry – i have nowhere near the necessary chem background to be taking this, so i’m putting it on pass/no record (mit is letting everyone put 1 class on p/nr this semester so if orgo is as painful as i’ve heard it is this is definitely the right choice)
• 6.009 fundamentals of programming – should be pretty straightforward and not that interesting especially as it’s in python, which is my most familiar language, but i likely need to get this prereq out of the way for other classes anyway
• 6.036 intro to machine learning – should also be pretty straightforward given i just worked through the coursera intro ml class, but i think it’s worth getting a second perspective on ml and learning to use something which isn’t matlab/octave
• 6.849 geometric folding algorithms – should be a very fun class! only offered every 3-5 years so i had to take it; the content is pretty unique and the prof is supposedly very interesting. 
• 18.821 project lab in mathematics – not super interesting; focuses on how to communicate math better (writeups, presentations, etc.), mostly only taking for degree requirements but maybe i’ll learn some interesting math
• 21m.284 film music – have heard pretty negative things about the prof but the content seems interesting enough and i honestly didn’t see many music classes that i’d enjoy taking virtually. also didn’t feel like this was the right semester for taking econ/history/lit/another writing class and didn’t find the philosophy listings very appealing so there weren’t that many options left

also, after some discussions i’m considering making this blog public again. it’ll depend on how easy it is to preserve the current list of readers and how convenient it would be to potentially revert back to private if necessary; more details later