Wow it’s over. What started as a personal challenge turned into a seven-week Android adventure. Oh what fun.
We were only required to do 180 or 240 hours (one of those, I'm not really sure). But I clocked in around1 281:52.....YEEEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
Flashback to last school year’s first semester, I did plan to take a summer internship but I didn’t really plan to take it at Azeus. Come to think of it, I never really had any plans on where I’ll take my internship. A joke we had around then was to take our internship at UPD’s CRS so that we can (illegally) tweak chances to our favor. When I took Azeus’ first exam, it was more like a personal challenge than anything internship-related. “Let’s take the exam,” I urged my friends, “so that we’ll know how entrance-job exams go.”
And so we did and I managed to take my internship at Azeus.
I don’t know how finished a product did we make out of our project. From my point of view, I’d give it at around 70%. Of the two features left assigned to me, I only managed to finish one 100%. Some misadventures with base codes and networking delayed me but finish it, I did, albeit untested thoroughly. The other one I’d give at around 60%. It had two bugs that really bugged me: a one-shot-big-shot dropping action key listener and a networking function that is a little too responsive for my liking.
I’m happy with how my internship turned out. Throughout my seven-week stay at Azeus, I managed to apply lessons which I thought I won’t be able to use after passing the courses concerned. I designed a (scrapped) statistical ranking system and had some (geeky) fun with percentiles and normal distributions. I debugged a lot of networking/threading issues that cropped up in my code, applying concepts from my OS and Computer Networks class in the process. I have further proved that learning through experience, in a real-world context, beats textbooks all the time.
(And least people start saying “See? Theory courses (algorithms class, ahem) don’t really play much in the industry. So why bother?”: During our group technical interview—part 2 of Azeus’ three-stage selection process—I used dynamic programming to solve the problem they gave us. In our batch, I was the only one who managed to solve the given problem *wink*)
We ended our internship with Build 6, if I remember correctly, which is more or less everything we managed to code sans the show-stopper non-working functions.
And party.
Ha! Pizza + Ice Cream. Shame that I was too busy getting more pizza than anyone else socializing to take pictures. But anyway, they gave certificates…
And we had some pictures taken…
I was in a hurry when I snapped this shot so it turned out blurred :C
And so it ends. It was a fun seven weeks. Surely, I wasn’t exaggerating at the title I gave for this post.
And now, to enjoy my break…
~ The Chad Estioco, logging-out for the last time (this summer, at least).
This is probably the happiest picture snapped this summer. What's funny about this is the fact that we just ate at McDonald's moments before this photo was taken. One of us was even holding a Coke Float!
- I say around because we log-in using a biometric fingerprint scanner while we log-out using a computer terminal. I noticed that the time in the fingerprint scanner and in the computer is out-synced by around 2-3 minutes. [↩]