Karol Kaczmarek

We’ve reached San Francisco International Airport around 6pm, took air train to the rental car agencies and  walked from one to another to find the best deal . After checking the prices online a week or two earlier, we’ve figured out we shouldn’t pay more that 1000 dollars for a car. Unfortunately, this price didn’t include additional costs like insurance (who would need it anyway?) and extra fee for drivers under 25 years. After all “bonuses” the price went to 1700$. No way!

Luckily, after 3 months of bargaining experience in India, I’ve negotiated the price and we got more than 400$ discount! Lessons from Asia are applicable everywhere . The salesman gave us keys and said not to worry too much, insurance will cover everything .  Cool, let’s go!

We took a car and drove to our hostel in the very center of San Francisco. It was already late, so we only took our cameras and went for a walk to see downtown by night… and met new friends on the way

Next morning we headed directly to the Fisherman’s Wharf where ferries to Alcatraz leave from. The walk itself was really pleasant, but tiring, as San Francisco is situated mainly on the hills.

We’ve spent three very interesting hours on the island listening about it’s history, famous prisoners and escape attempts. My favorite one was when someone (I don’t remember the name) used the spoon to dig to ventilation shaft and get to the roof through it. It was the only attempt which perhaps succeeded, but noone is sure if he together with 2 friends managed to swim through the San Francisco bay.

We went also to the famous Pier 39 – third most visited place in the USA – where, apart from hundreds adorable shops with food and turistic stuff, the nice colony of sea lions can be watched!

For the sunset we drove to the twin peaks, two hills south and west of downtown offering spectacular views of the city. Great opportunity to polish my – still – poor photography skills (I’ve finally started experimenting with manual mode this summer ). But still, the view even on my photos looks amazing!

After eating dinner on those hills we came back to our hostel where crazy receptionist was shouting through the megaphone that there is free beer available in the club downstairs! We gave it a try and spent evening playing beerpong with other travellers Nice end of the beautiful day in San Francisco!

Yesterday I was writing about the end of my internship at Microsoft, today I will write about the begining of great next journey, codename: California Road Trip! 

Together with Czarek, who was also interning at MS this summer we want to rent a car and visit some of the best places in California. The plan is quite simple: fly to San Francisco, see the main attractions and Sillicon Valley (of course), then go to Yosemite, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas where we will stay for a few days and set out for a day trips to Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Hoover’s dam. But it’s just a plan… let’s see what will happen

I’m currently sitting at the Airport with Czarek. Seattle farewells  us with rain, although during whole summer the weather was surprisingly good (or perhaps I didn’t expect too much after all the stories about the “rainy city”).

Anyway, I hope the state of sunshine will welcome us with the beautiful, sunny September .

It’s done. Today was my last day of internship. I wanted to say that it was amazing experience to work at Microsoft. For three months I could be member of a great team and took part in the very interesting project which, as opposed to most of university projects, won’t be thrown away after I leave (at least people assured me it won’t). Quite the opposite, this feature will be shipped with the next Windows Server (version 9, Windows Server 8 was presented just a couple of days ago during the //Build conference)!

That’s really exciting!

Another important aspect of the whole thing are people. I met a bunch of other interns and full time employees and had opportunity to network and hang out with them during summer. I hope I will be able to stay in touch with at least some of them later!

Finally, as I presented in the previous posts (NDA blocked me from posting more about my work itself ), it was also a lot of fun! There was really a LOT of entertaining events organized for all of us, which made my stay here even more memorable.

At the end, I would like to thank my manager, mentor and all people from my team for a great support they’ve provided me during internship! I appreciate it a lot and know that without you the project wouldn’t be successful.

Long weekend (today is labor day… no work ) passed really quickly. So did almost the whole internship. Most of my job is already done and during last two weeks I’ll focus on stretch goals and final presentation. Hope gods of DEMOS will be with me

Good number of interns have already gone (American students start school relatively early… usually beginning of September), so August was much less rich in terms of fun activities organized by Microsoft than July. It’s not that bad as it may sound, at least those who stayed (including me:P) could focus more on actually getting the projects done .

As I mentioned in the last post, there was the biggest intern event on the 28th of July – Intern Signature Event. Dozens of buses took us to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to spend there nice evening with BBQ, Dave Matthews (I had no idea who he is, but seriously, he seems to be pretty popular in US) and… FREE XBOXes! Yeah, every intern got one with kinect One the next day the company store with games was literally besieged!

So… once the MS events ended we had to figure out what to do on weekends on our own. Luckily there was still a bunch of interns staying, so we could do some short hikes or trips. Seattle and Redmond is situated amazingly well if you are into natural beauty.
We decided to go to the Olympic National Park…

and Cannon Beach in Oregon with famous Haystack Rock. By the way, the nice thing about Oregon is that it was first time in US they didn’t ask me for ID while buying a beer . Well, in Seattle they wouldn’t ask either… they accept only passports…

Other weekends I’ve been spending in Seattle visiting attractions which were on my must-see list (if anyone would need some recommendations, I’d be glad to help ).

And if everything goes well, two weeks from now I should be in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or somewhere near, as I really don’t want to leave US yet California road trip should be a good way to spend time.

First month at Microsoft is over. And it was really a blast! Not only because that I’ve joined a great team to work on the very interesting project (which I unfortunately can’t write about, but it will most probably be included in Windows 8 Server ), but also because of numerous great events which accompany the whole internship!

And I definitely am allowed to elaborate on it a little bit more here . Great events happen literally every day here! I’ve just checked my employee calendar and it looks like in whole July there were only a couple of days without special events… or I missed something What are these? In this post I would like to list some of the most interesting to give you some insight .

Intern Spotlight Speaker Series
These are weekly presentations just for interns during which departments’ executives deliver speeches about their products, goals and plans. These events have really great attendance… and it’s not because of free pizza and beer. Wait… isn’t it? ;P.

Puzzle day
This is my favorite so far. Whole day of solving amazing, tricky and sometimes witty puzzles and running across the Microsoft campus. That was A LOT of fun!

Intern day of caring
During day of caring interns spend one day of their internship outside of their offices, volunteering in NGOs. My group cleared 88,345 square feet of invasive plants in beautiful Seward Park… no idea how someone calculated it

And after volunteering there was huge barbecue prepared on the soccer field.

Stay late & code events
I think the name is clear enough . Well… some of us have it almost every day even without attending This event is fun in a little bit different way though… probably not everyone can understand it (I am sure you do though! ), but staying late and working in a group on your side projects can be fun as well!

Game nights
In Microsoft there is a lot of gamers, so naturally, there are also events for them!

Intern social group events
What is intern social group? It’s a bunch or interns who generally start internship at the same time, have FTE (Full Time Employee) assigned and hang out together!
These events are a lot of fun. It’s enough to say that my first one was at Sky High Sports Center in Bellevue:




Meetings organized by recruiters
My recruiter, Amanda organized really cool event named International Interns Pizza Party. Pizza was tasty, but the best part was that I finally could play in my first band ever!

Special presentations just for your department!
These are a little bit smaller, but also interesting, mainly because subjects are directly connected with products you work on and you can meet and network with people directly from your department. Btw. I am working in STB (Server & Tools Business) .

Breakfast series
Breakfast series presentations start very early and I am a night owl, so I haven’t attend any yet I heard they are good though! If you like getting up early, definitely go for it and you will get to know a lot of useful stuff!

Excursions
There is a lot of interesting things to do around Seattle. Hiking in Mount Rainier National Park or sailing on the bay are just some examples of activities organized especially for you during internship!

Intern signature event
This is the most important intern event which will gather all MS interns in… Woodland Zoo next Thursday! Could you think about better place for such meeting? I simply can’t wait to be able to write more about it!

4th of July in Gas Works Park
This one is not organized by Microsoft (fireworks are co-sponsored by MS though), but you definitely don’t want to miss it!

I hope I didn’t forget about any relevant event, but you can already see it was a lot of things going on! And that’s just one month… a very busy one
There will be a lot of things happening later on, so after finishing work and leaving your office… the day is definitely not over yet!

Imagine Cup 2011 has ended!

I will go directly to the clue and present the winners of nine categories.
Ireland, Taiwan, Brazil, Poland, France, Romania, Korea, Greece and Denmark – these countries performed best in their categories. Besides one gold medal in Game Design (Web) I am glad to write that Poland got also one second place (IT Challenge) and one third (Interoperability). Even having in mind it’s big representation, this is a good result

Huge congratulations to all teams and let’s start thinking about next year finals in Australia!

List of all IC 2011 winners

The finals of the biggest technology competitions in the world have begun today. Hundreds of enthusiastic, smart students brought their projects to New York to present them, compete with others, solve the world’s toughest problems and have fun in the same time! I really wish I could be there for this week, as I still remember how amazing were IC finals in Cairo (2009) and Warsaw (2010).

Poland has numerous representation (like some year we did not… ;P) which will compete in 5 categories:

Date: 09.2010 – 06.2011
Visited countries: Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia
Traveled distance: ~ 8 000 km
Crew: Hundred of crazy Erasmus students
Goal: Spend amazing year studying at the foreign university.

Route/Visited places:

Pokaż Erasmus na większej mapie

Blog posts:
Erasmus – is it worth it

Gallery:
Erasmus

First weekend almost passed by. I arrived to Seattle Tacoma Airport at about 11pm, after 18-hour journey. My friend (with whom I was only emailing so far) Szymon was waiting there to pick me up and take to Redmond. During a drive it occured that I will stay in the same complex where he is living, around 100m from each other. Good luck! We spent 2 hours talking and sipping a beer .

The place I live in is amazing, fitness center is just next door, free billard, jacuzzi and even small cinema not much further. I hope I will have time to make use of it after work

Next day Szymon helped me to get to the car rental agency and I rented a car to look around during first days here. It was “my” first car with automatic gearbox, but it’s probably easier to switch from manual to automatic than the other way .

I didn’t have any food in the fridge, so I started a day in classic American style, eating some fast food in KFC. I hope it won’t become my habit . In the afternoon my roommate Damian invited me to meet his friends and play video games. I usually don’t spend my spare time in this way, but I thought it’s a great occasion to meet first interns… and it was:) We spent a nice couple of hours playing and talking.

After that someone wanted to see a cake which was famous of being the inspiration for some game… I really cannot remind myself it’s title right now. Anyway… it was supposed to be in the bakery near their place… 1 mile or so. Unfortunately it was a very long mile, as it took us more than half an hour to get there… and coming back was even longer. Pretty long walk just to see some cake. But this is it, impressive, huh?

On sunday we went to see Snoqualmie falls, 82m high waterfall between Snoqualmie and Fall City, about 30 kilometers east of Redmond. After seeing Niagara falls I didn’t expect it will amaze me, but it was also really huge. Waterfalls always remind me how powerful is the nature, so I like just staying and watching them.

Now it’s around 9pm and I feel pretty much tired. I think the jet lag is still working against me :/ This night I woke up at 4am and couldn’t fall asleep, so I log in to skype and talked with my girlfriend, family and friends for almost 3 hours. Then I took a shower and… went to sleep again I am afraid this night will be similar… we will see
Tomorrow is my first day at Microsoft so I hope I won’t come there after staying awake whole night

Everything ends. Even my one year of studies in Austria, which at the beginning seemed to me so long, passed incredibly quickly. Unfortunately.

Now I am sitting at the airport Klagenfurt, drinking cocktail and preparing my mind for next big adventure… summer internship at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond (~20km from Seattle). I feel like one of my dreams is coming true right now. I will be a member of one team in the Business and Tools department, but the exact project I will work on is still not known… at least not to me .

The process of getting an internship is, as usually, going through few interviews and doing your best there What makes Microsoft interviews different is that they are very technical and after few (or even not) “warm-up” questions you have to solve technical problems. First you need to present the idea and then write the code on paper, which is much harder than typing it on keyboard (and taking advantage of IntelliSense etc.). I had two interviews at Poznan University of Technology when Microsoft Interviewers came there last year and then three additional in Munich during the “second round”.

Luckily I was accepted and during next three months I will try to write some notes about my experience at Microsoft