Hey there! It’s now week four, also known here in Redmond as “two-weeks-before-OneWeek,” where a ton of awesome events are planned (as well as the Imagine Cup… hype!).
Aside from the waking up part, I had a great Monday! After getting settled in with a can of apple juice and having my weekly checkin with my manager, Briana, I dove right into the code of the Touch Develop Minecraft extension I started on last week. With everything running smoothly already, most of the work I did was general cleanups and optimizations. I’ve also gotten in the rhythm of spending a bit of my Mondays doing some research- this week’s topic of study was data encryption. This is a great resource if you’re interested in the nitty gritty of hashing algorithms, cool stuff!
(Oh! It’s a secret, but I think I’m going to hold an intro-to-modding session on campus during my last week. I’ll leak more details when I have them!)
I spent my Tuesday polishing off the Touch Develop extension: fixing a few last-minute issues, setting up my Gradle environment (a build automation service) to compile the project, and packaging the obfuscated files into a shared folder for the Mojang team to try out. I also wrote up a little readme file with installation instructions and a brief tutorial, something I haven’t done in years. I also finally decided to try out the IntelliJ IDE for Minecraft development- I wish I had done this sooner! The setup process was so much easier than it is for Eclipse; no detailed project structuring was necessary to deal with my various Mekanism modules, it just magically set itself up from my build script. I went to the Lincoln Square Cafe in downtown Bellevue with a few friends for lunch- not only did I get to enjoy a delicious taco salad while overlooking the city skyline, but I actually saw the Manchester United soccer team’s tour bus pull up right beside a hotel on our way back- I was not expecting to see Rooney himself today. I’m still a little caught off guard.
Though my Wednesday started out slow, it picked up in pace pretty fast! I finally had a meeting with Peli of the Microsoft Research team who I demoed my work on the Minecraft extension to, and we came up with some cool (but confidential!) ideas that I’ll be starting on soon. The extension itself should also be reaching the Mojang team by now, I’m excited to hear feedback! I’m also starting to seriously plan out this intro-to-modding session; it’s really shaping up well and I know it’s going to be awesome. It’s also proving to be good logistics/coordination experience for me – there’s a lot that goes into making these kinds of things happen that you wouldn’t realize!
I only spent about an hour in my office on Thursday and not much more on Friday- definitely full days! I had the opportunity to attend the CEO’s intern talk where I managed to grab front-row seats (after waiting in line for over an hour), it was crazy to see Satya so close in person after only seeing him in pictures. Even better, he mentioned me and my projects during the Q/A session- crazy! Aside from my weekly LeX video shoot, I held a meeting on Friday regarding a demo session we’re holding next week for my Minecraft extension I’ve been working on. It will be the first time my software is actually going to be used so it’s pretty high stakes- I have to make sure everything is working beforehand!
I only have three weeks left, but there’s still so much more to do. I have a feeling I’m going to be fairly busy… see you in a week!