E3 2013 occurred on Monday (day 35) and it was fun to watch the xbox one fail yet even schadenfreude can get boring. Fallout 4 did not get announced nor did valve give details on the streambox. I expect to buy a PS4 and I am impressed at Sony’s engineer’s squeezing the console’s guts into such a tight box.

Even my personal projects did not receive much labour. PPSSPP is no closer to working key mapping and other projects have been on the back burner for months now.  Of life’s chores only next year’s courses got completed. My last school year will have some interesting courses matching my preference for coding over essays. So this week’s achievement is perhaps setting up next year for awesomeness.

Looking back on this uneventful week makes me want to aceive more, for that I need to focus. As always I am writing this on a Saturday (day 40) so this weekend may or may not result in productivity.

I have no confidence in the day counts now. Not being zero based and combining with variable month lengths I am not even attempting for accuracy. Day 24 if my math is correct denotes the fourth Friday of my internship.

Day 24

Every developer in Windows Sustained Engineering went curling!

No one had curled before! We except me and some others since Microsoft has held morale events at the curling rink before. My curling experience dates back to childhood when my parents attempted to have me participate with some friends in after school curling. The rink was cold and I remember hating it.

It turns out curling is a fun game. We split up into four groups and each group split into two teams apiece. Before we started a staff member took 40 minutes and introduced us to the game’s basics.

A full curling game consists of 8 ends. After each end all the curling rocks have migrated to the other rink end so things reset. The most interesting and confusing aspect of curling is the scoring. The target is bull’s eye shaped but the scoring is all relative unlike darts. The team with the rock closest to the centre will get a point for every one of their rocks between the centre and the closest opposing team rock. Thus getting a rock in the perfect centre can turn an end from 4 points in the opposing team’s favour to one point in your favour.

Our first of only two scores =(

In the end my team lost 2 points against 5! We had won the first two ends by one point apiece but then the other team flipped the entire game with 3 points in the third end. The fourth end almost gave them an extra 4 points until Ramesh landed one rock and invalidated three of their rocks! It does not sound like much but the curling scoring rules create a dramatic dynamic.

Despite the physical sores a sport like curling inflicts on my lazy physic I went to intern apphack event that night. I intended to work with someone else but as I sat down in the back of the crowded food court all I cared to do was play Pikmin with my new xbox controller. Ten minutes into the presentation and half a pikmin day later someone pulled the fire alarm. I thus not only got to go home early but also got to take photos of cool fire engines!

The rear cap houses the rear wheal’s driver. It is not attached to the ladder.

Apple sells the clip in their company store which is accessible without a company badge. This makes it accessible to freed geeks’ odd sense of humour.  Photo of a co-worker’s badge after a trip to Silicon Valley.

Day 25

My mother came to visit! For atleast half a year after I got the internship my mother has been plotting to visit Seattle while attending a linguistic’s conference in Victoria. We spent the day visiting Seatle’s downtown’s sights. Beyond anything it was nice to see my mother again. I still have two more months so I better make a note to video chat again before much time passes. It is amazing how long a month is. I remember arriving but it feels like a distant past.

We took a monorail to the Seattle Needle. I paid full price but my mentor later mentioned that there are discounts from Microsoft employees which I forgot to use.

Top of the Seattle Needle viewing south over the downtown.

Day 27 to 32

Lots of work! Lots of fun work! I wrote parser and interpreter, gave a presentation on printing, got a new bug assigned to me, watched my first bug getting marked fixed. A full week and good representation of what I hope my next two months will be filled with.

For a presentation at Microsoft I wanted to end on a fun note and provide some printing trivial. My online searches for information related to port 9100 and printing over it turned up sparse. The only reason I knew anything about port 9100 was from pouring over Foomatic’s driver metadata database two summers ago. I think this method might also be known as JetDirect or Direct Print. WIkipedia’s only obvious mention is the port’s official registration as “PDL Data Stream”.

As the official port registration implies that text I mentioned pushing to the printer can in fact have PDL instructions embed.

PDL stands for Page Description Language. This term is related to PCL which stands for Printer Command Language. PCL is not supposed to be a PDL since it allows for printer control. In theory this extra power should make PCL a member of the more general Printer Control Language group. Thus, in theory, when Wikipedia says “PDL Data Stream” the implication is that there is no control granted over the printer itself. In practice printers sometimes treat the PDL sent over port 9100 as commands. I think some HP printer firmware updates get sent this way. The net result has been various security bugs over the years.

The genius of port 9100 is in the pure reality that no other network printing protocol can be simpler. Even printing over UDP would complicate the process by requiring a END_OF_PRINT_JOB instruction. Instead port 9100 treats the TCP’s closure as the submit command.

You can try porting over port 9100 yourself by running from the command line:

$ netcat PRINTER_IP 9100
$ Hello World
$ <Ctrl+c>

Hope that helped. I also hope I did not write anything too inaccurate.

Day 13

Church was nice and only a 15 minute walk. Later in the day I went shopping. So far it appears one trip a week can last a good week with some surplus.

Day 14

Monday morning I double checked my bag for my paper work and bussed over to the Social Security Office. At the Social Security Office you have to take a ticket and wait. The wait took less than an hour and I was back on Mirosoft campus in time for the weekly Devices and Networking Team(DNT) lunch. It was nice to get the last of my immigration paper work done.

Day 15

Tuesday the 21st was the new Xbox’s announcement. I can say the true surprise of the morning was the name. Of all the the name rumours none had come close “Xbox One”. My favourite of these rumours had been the “Xbox Infinity”. The abrupt flip from innumerable to 1 was the event’s only present twist. I never intended to buy an Xbox but I expected at least one feature to make me envious.  Instead the entire device looks like Microsoft leveraging a successful product to capture another market. It looks like the bluechip Microsoft is winning against the “cool” Microsoft by trading in Microsoft’s coolest product for a DVR.

In all the monring felt like a waste. Three months after Sony’s Playstation 4 reveal I expected to see much more infromation. Microsoft could have saved us all time and posted a simple press release.

Days 16 & 17

These two work days were consumed with a Windows bootcamp for Interns. Two days of lectures which I am not sure were worth the time. All of the talks were interesting in some respect. Most had no applicability to this summer’s work but I assume were intended to give everyone a taste for the Windows organization as a whole. On the plus side I won a copy of Windows Internals the sixth edition.  Between the two large tomes there are no sections on printing.

I am not sure I wanted these but I cannot give up a chance to win things. I waited until it was clear no one else was going to answer the question.

Afterwards I read Anandatech’s articles on AMD’s new CPUs. Since I will be investing again in a new PC after the internship I need to update my parts knowledge. A lot has changed since I built my workstation in 2009.

Day 18

Beyond a personal project and this blog post today will consist of catching up on anime. Between some shows from last season and this season’s best shows I have plenty to keep me entertained.

More computer setup and meetings. At one point I overwrote my main worksttion’s operating system with Hyper-v Server by mistake. I thought “Hyper-v Server” meant a server daemon or, in windows terms, a service, terms for programs which run forever. Instead it was a complete stand-alone operating system. This mistake meant reinstalling Windows 8 and every dev tool.

My commute consist of a 30 minute walk from the north west tip of microsoft campus to the south east corner. My japanese study fits perfect into this timeslot. Last semester there was no appropriate timeslot and study often got pushed so late that it delayed bedtime. Next year my university commute will require a 40 minute bus & train ride which will see similar use. So while I was annoyed at the prospect of losing 1,5 hours of the day this time should go to good use.

Starting my commute twenty steps outside my door. Bellevue Meadows is about a block long but exits across the street from Microsoft campus.

Mid way through the commute I cross the highway along a bridge that looks nothing like a bridge. The bridge looks like a simple continuation of the other tree lined roads which make up Microsoft campus.

It is only when walking across the bridge that the highway flowing underneath becomes visible.

I have to be thankful that Redmond is not always overcast or raining because when it is not the sun paints everything beautiful. These buildings also serve as the end of my morning commute.

Days 6 & 7: the first full weekend

I got almost nothing done on saturday beyond catching up on missed anime.

Sunday me and david took the B line bus to walmart. We stuffed both backpacks and two oversized grocery bags with household items and food. The MEC backpack my dad helped select saved my back for the second time. The first time I overloaded it being the first monday, also with groceries. This shopping trip the bag held every heavy item we bought and kept the weight off my shoulders.

Days 7 to 12

At some point this week it rained in Seattl. I do not remember which day but the rain was light. Compared to Calgary rain which either does not exist or comes as a downpour this week’s rain was a drizzle. A few days were overcast but nothing worth wearing my coat for.

Overcast view from my office

On the 21st, the 15th day on my internship, Microsoft will announce the new Xbox. Even within Microsoft all developers who might know anything have been sealed off into special buildings. In preparation for the event Microsoft has built a tent over the main soccer field. The soccer field itself is in the middle of Microsoft’s new Studio buildings. It is within these buildings that Microsoft is developing the Xbox. While I do not plan to purchase an xbox I am exited at the prospect of a new hardware generation. Rumors also purport that my favorite game maker will announce the next version of my favorite game, Fallout 4. As time ticks down I am hoping Microsoft will provide an internal video stream or maybe even an employee event.

Future site of the xbox announcement. Photo taken 8 days before the announcement.

So far I am making an effort to attend every possible meeting but this does mean little besides meetings occurs on fridays. The meetings tend to end on time and stay on topic so they are at the least predictable. In every meeting there was a well defined goal and the meeting organizer always kept  discussion on topic. If you must have meetings then this is the way to do so.

The big event this summer is a contest sponsored by Microsoft’s Phone division  This contest, Apphack 2013, is about developing ”innovative” applications for windows phone 8. Before the judging rules were post David and I were going to create a html5 platformed  We recruited another intern David met, Jay. The three of us were pretty excited until the judging rules got posted. While the rules do not forbid using html5 which was one of my worries, they do specify a scoring criteria which leaves our platformer no room for victory, Today, the 11th day, we are meeting to discuss our options  Either developing our platformer, switching to a more “innovative” idea, or working together on an unrelated idea.

This second week occured fast. I feel more comfortable with the software and my summer project has been decided on. On Friday, day 11, I borrowed a printer and started writing a simple stress testing program. All small steps towards my projects but it feels nice to be making measurable progress.

My office as of Friday of second week.

Since neither of us checked the building’s location before leaving I was very wrong. We went two blocks too far south. We asked the desk at one of the buildings, south of the Microsoft studios, for directions and they gave us an updated map. Every other map I had seen prior was missing the new Microsoft game studios and the Commons Cafeteria. I have since lost this awesome map otherwise I would post it.

The orientation itself assisted us through about 3 sheets of dense legal forms. I messed up and wrote my birthday under this current year (2013) and a Microsoft lawyer even caught the mistake then and there.

After orientation, or NEO in microsoft speak, we headed off to our team’s office’s,  but not before we all got free launch and a t-shirt.

This makes three Microsoft t-shirts!

Upon arrival my team was in a bi-weekly trio meeting. A trio meeting is when test, dev, and project management gets together and checks on progress. Since I am in Sustained Engineering progress means bugs. Of course we are now getting into NDA territory. All I can say is that there were indeed bugs, and that progress was being made on fixing unsaid bugs.

I spent the next day or two, or three, configuring my workstation and reading. A major portion of this amounted to acquiring source files and building. On one hand I miss Linux’s tradition of everything using make files. On the other hand building Windows means building what would amount to a full distro in the linux world. Compared to the distros’ build farms Microsoft has developed a convenient build process.

The view from my temporary office. A recent re-organization left open an office right between my mentor and our boss. I may move before the summer is over.

My roommate, David, ran the same test so I know I cannot be alone in this curiosity.

Microsoft’s free pop will either cure my suger habit or cure my healthy BMI. This first day I went overboard but I have since been drinking more tea. I am not alone with the tea; this floor of the building alone is consuming about half a box of green tea bags per week.

We did not find much. Beyond various signs the campus bore no markings of Nintendo. I was hoping for maybe a Mario statue but there was not even an occasional plushie on a window sill.

The lone Wii. No Wii Fitness boards were seen.

Look! We found a nintendo sign! Or atleast maybe, the sign lacked the critical border around the logotype. We can only assume this was not a Genuine Seal Nintendo sign.

My roommate, David, says the Vancouver airport had a full staff at nine employees compared to Calgary’s one. He spent only 15 minutes in secondary inspection.

The 2.5 hour wait forced me to miss my flight. Alaska Airlines tried their best to book an alternative flight but that did not work and I waited until Sunday for Alaska’s next direct flight. It was apparent the Alaska employees cared and had the authority to fix the situation. So thank you to Alaska Airlines for getting me to Seattle before Monday’s orientation.

Snapshots of the flight itself:

Our plane before loading

A random Calgary suburb

This river will join Calgary’s main river and will flow into the Hudson bay.

Most of the flight between Calgary and Seattle is over mountains. This is the mesmerizing top down view of mountains no game has quite replicated.

That clump of buildings in the photo’s middle is Microsoft’s Redmond campus. One of the squarish buildings is Nintendo of America.

Golang has prove itself awesome to play with. GoGo Wars! started from a late night whim and has grown bit by bit and may become a playable game. The amazing part is how refactoring in Go has kept the codebase flexible. Yesterday I added unit collision by rewriting the adhoc shared game state into a proper shared object. 20% of the existing code got touched in some way yet the rework did not feel like drudgery. Changing object name or types did not cause a cascade of boiler plate rewrote. Yet Go still provides strict typing. So far in less than 1000 lines every major feature of go has found a use. In total golang is proving to be my new second favourite language.

The next two cover the process before the Redmond interviews which in turn is the third section.

Applying at Campus Career Fair

You can apply either online or in person if Microsoft sends recruiters to your campus. If you get the chance to apply in-person you should jump on it. Microsoft’s recruiters were real engineers and a lot of fun to talk to. A few months ago I wrote about my application. One thing I should add is the on campus recruiters perform a resume screen before sending the collected resumes to Microsoft. At the Q&A session the recruiters held after the career fair they warned about dropping off resumes without chatting.

Reading in between the lines I think this means the recruiters were tasked with making recommendations. Without talking to you they can only go by your resume which is no better than submitting online.

On campus interview, aka first round interview

I also wrote a post on my first round interview. Overall at this stage I would worry about whiteboard coding and have a project you can talk passionately about. Also take the time to review as many problems online as you can. Microsoft says they want candidates passionate about tech and I do not think those are not fluff words. This does mean you need to worry about signalling your passion. Getting excited and animated is easy for me but I know many programmers are a lot more reserved. You might need to practice by talking with yourself. One extra warning: check your house for quiet roommates before entering into long & loud debates with yourself over technique subjects. Nothing is quite as awkward as discussing the merits of C++’s exception handling then turning a corner and running into your roommate.

After the first round interview I got an email of congratulations. About two weeks later someone contacted me with the interview date and arranged travel to Redmond.

Redmond Interviews, aka second round interviews

Finding out who I was interviewing with

Two days before I was to leave a third person emailed telling me who I would be interviewing with. Their email’s exact text was “Windows Windows Live”. Now if you are a non-Microsoft employee this means two exact things: 1, they made a typo and wrote Windows twice, and 2, I was interviewing with Windows Live. I later verified this conclusion with other interns. Since I was gunning for low level work to complement my prior experience I was disappointed.

Yet I was wrong. It turns out Windows Windows Live is Microspeak, jargon specific to Microsoft. Since intern candidates are by definition not working at Microsoft you can imagine why we would get confused by this Microspeak. What Windows Windows Live is supposed to mean is Windows & Windows Live, which is a division of Microsoft.

It may seem like a minor issue but for the few hours it took to discover the misunderstanding my enthusiasm was killed. I was still happy with the chance to interview but working outside of my existing interests wasn’t very appealing.

Flying to Seattle for the Interviews

Below is a photo I took the night I flew out. There is nothing special about the photo, this is Calgary’s natural state. By this time of year the concept of a room temperture outside is foreign. The snow bleaches the landscape a cold white. The occasional chinook may melt the snow but this serves only as torture by simulating the beginning of winter, again.

Now here it is before the flight, at 18:00. We do not get very much sun during winter.

And for comparison here is Seattle before my flight home:

When I landed in Seattle I could smell the air, and it was sweet. I thought I might have been smelling spilled oil or other plane liquids but the sweet smell carried on into the city!

It did rain over my stay but that was not enough to dampen my enthusiasm to Seattle. Stepping off the plane was like time travelling five months forward to a none frozen Calgary.

Both my way there and my way back was quite painless. Microsoft arranged for a towncar to pick me up at the airport and even provided a Taxi voucher for the way back to the airport from the hotel. It was only back in Calgary that I had to arrange my own transportation.

The reimbursement for my travel and food expensive was also painless. I have already received and cashed the check. They even provided an option to reimburse in Canadian dollars.

The stay

Microsoft booked me at the Westin in Bellevue. I must say the hotel was the nicest I’ve ever stayed in. For a bit I got worried Microsoft had mistaken me for a full time candidate since it was that nice.

Morning of the Interview

At point I had yet to meet a Microsoft employee. Everyone from the towncar driver to the hotel knew I was coming. It almost felt like Microsoft was masterminding everything, always in control but never appearing. Since I don’t travel often this made the trip much more relaxing.

12:00 was our departure time so I went down to the lobby at 11:30 hoping to meet some other candidates. At first there was just three of us. One New Yorker and an Ontarian. The New Yorker was interviewing with the Office division and the Ontarian with Servers & Tools. As more intern candidates piled into the lobby’s couches we found out that the Ontarian was vastly outnumbered. Everyone else was split between Windows & Windows Live and Office. All the candidates were Software Development Engineer candidates.

When 12:00 hit we all split up into buses based on interviewing division. The trip to Microsoft’s Redmond campus did not take long and we were soon at the main Windows & Windows Live building. After checking in and receiving name tags we moved to a large board room. This board room acted as our home base. In between interviews we all returned and had ~15 minutes to eat, chat, and rest up for the next interview.

Interviewing at Microsoft

The whole interview process was planned and scheduled. And when I say scheduled I mean we received a schedule:

After launch at 13:00 the interviews started. This was both the most interesting portion of the experience and the portion I can least talk about. Prior I had read most of Glassdoor’s interview reports but even so all the questions I was asked were new to me. I liked it that way since I could puzzle through the problems and ask real questions. One interesting fact was that all candidates were asked questions from the same question pool. Thus after the interviews we all chatted about the questions.

For the first interview my interviewer was from Visual Studios.To my despair I missed the solution by a mile. Here I’ve gone and flown to another country and I’m grasping at straws on the first question. I was humbled and just a bit depressed. To my luck this question was a tricky problem for most people. One of the Office candidates told me the official answer and I think I might have been close without realizing it.

The second interview went better but not great. My interviewer was from the Internet Explorer team and picked a question from outside my area of expertise and had the grace to tell me so. This made me feel better about not completing the entire question. My implementation was going fine until it wasn’t. One of the three cases I needed to handle required me to break a critical assumption I made at the top of my implementation. This was after taking a decent quantity of time to come up with my algorithm. Still I am proud of how far I did get even if I did not very far at all.

Interview number three was the most awesome. I had an interviewer from the Windows Kernel! He even had a massive unix hacker beard! To be more specific he worked on the filesystem. His question style was to look over your resume, pick a term, then ask you “What is <term>?”. If you were not excepting this, like I wasn’t, then you’ll be taken aback. Still he was a lot of fun to talk to and had no problem with me referring back to linux for the technical questions.

My final and forth interviewer was from Sustained Engineering and will be my boss this summer. This interview went the smoothest of all. I found the “perfect” solution and implemented it with only one bug resulting from my being clever. In hindsight a bug due to over cleverness is the exact *wrong* thing to do when your interviewer has to deal with the resulting codebase. My clever trick was to use bit manipulation to avoid a conditional branch which I then not mixed up with negation in two’s complement.

In every interview I had a real chance to ask questions and got honest answers. They even stopped my problem solving to leave time for questions. The interviews themselves were held in various unused offices. The offices had two chairs, a desk, and one or more whiteboards. The occupied offices I walked past were well outfitted for programming. As a bonus there was even a pile of old unused computer parts and monitors sitting in the larger corridor. I can only assume that this pile bodes well for a non-authoritarian office environment.

On a fun note one of the interviewers used a prototype Surface Pro, this was a few days after the official announcement. I only noticed it when he closed the kickstand and I got a glimpse of the distinctive “128GB” labelling. He said the battery worked very well for his needs. Note: I’m not sure if this information counts as confidential or marketing.

Results

After the interviews we piled back onto buses and went to a Microsoft showroom/waiting room. There was a Microsoft Pixelsense, Microsoft Xboxes, Microsoft Phones, and Microsoft snacks. To be honest I don’t think Microsoft designed the snacks; but they did provide them. There was pop in a mini ridge and bowls of candy everywhere. While waiting for the results we played tower defence on the Pixelsense, snacked, or chatted. Some candidates browsed wikipedia for sights to visit the next day.

About an hour later the first candidate was given his results. He had not been accepted. Soon after I was called away.

Imagine my excitement when the recruiter said “Congratulations!”. Yup, I managed to get the internship despite not solving all the questions and failing the first interview.

Since multiple recruiters were delivering the news in parallel when I got back to the waiting room only three candidates were left. Me and another guy took an SUV back to the Westin and I went off on my own to find a McDonalds. Other candidates, successful or not, went off to max their food budget. I would have went with them but I wanted to skype my parents.

Offer Details

Microsoft said not to disclose the exact details. What I will say is that it is high, as in rivalling the introductory full time offer territory. The offer should be equivalent or superior to Google’s. The base monthly salary should be similar but Microsoft subsidizes housing. I also checked with a friend who got a SDET internship that the offer does not discriminate between development and testing. I do not know the Project Manager Intern’s offer was different.

One thing to note is the contract contains a non-compete clause: I cannot work on any software that competes with any of Microsoft’s products for six months after the internship. In a nice aspect the contract does allow personal projects provided they are unrelated to my Microsoft work.

Final Thoughts

I am very excited for this summer.

That Microsoft has no problem with my Linux heavy experience is impressive. I hope this means Microsoft has changed and is not the insular monolith I used to hear about. One of the candidates with an offer even wore his Google backpack from his last summer’s internship for the interview, and no chairs were thrown at him!