February's Over?
The past week was a busy one, so I’ll try to compress it as much as I can.
On Monday, I presented a paper, “When APIs are Intentionally Bypased: An Exploratory Study of API Workarounds,” at the Software Engineering Reading Group (SERG). This is the one reading group that I’d consider myself an actual member of (I try my best to make it each week), and it’s a joint one with our lab and some folks down south at the University of Washington.
I think giving presentations is becoming slightly easier, and I had a better time with being happy with how I performed in comparison to other times. The group had a great discussion about APIs, and Rene even told us about a time he had to bypass the Java compiler’s reflection API to instrument some code for a study.
On Tuesday, I had final interviews for a company that I’d never expected to work at. In fact, I didn’t even remember applying to work there when I got the initial email in January inviting me to interview. Turns out I sent in an application sometime in October of last year. This was definitely nerve-wracking; it was 3 hours of back-to-back interviews. The closest experience I’ve had to this was probably when I interviewed at Microsoft as a wide-eyed second-year student back in 2017. I wasn’t really planning to go on an internship this summer, but I decided to interview anyway just for the experience. It also worked out pretty well, since I was just coming back from reading week when I had a bit more free time to “prepare” as best as I can (I really don’t like the format of interviews in tech, but I guess they’re not going to change anytime soon).
I was told at the start of my interviews that I would have an answer by the following Tuesday (so, March 2), but I got a call from the recruiter last Thursday telling me that I’d got the job. This came as a massive shock to me, since I felt like I didn’t do incredibly well on the interviews. Maybe they were just bamboozled by the fact that I chose to do every question in Scala instead of Python like most people seem to prefer. So this summer, I’ll be working remotely for a company in San Francisco.
I’m going to leave the company unnamed for now because I’m still struggling to believe that this is actually real, and to make sure that there aren’t going to be any weird issues with visas. I’m not sure if I still need one if I’m going to be working remotely from Canada, and never setting foot in the US for the entire duration of the internship. Once I get everything figured out, I’ll post a meme on Twitter, or something.
Alison and I are also getting started on our project for CPSC 508 (Operating Systems). We’ve decided to extend a debugger for the R programming language that uses provenance to collect finer-grained information about dataflow. We want to support the use-case where a developer may want to automatically generate an issue report from a debugging trace. I feel like that’ll be a huge chunk of work going forward, but I gotta pass this course somehow.
On Friday, the lab had an awesome social event where we proceeded to kill each other and erode any sense of trust we had (Among Us), and we watched “The Big Lebowski” afterwards. I have to say, it wasn’t my favourite film, but maybe it’s one of those movies that just grows on you after a couple viewings. I also (perhaps in poor judgement), watched Minari this weekend, and I’ll definitely write about that at some point when I’ve had more time to chew on it.
Anyway, that’s all for now!