Last Summer
This was my last summer as a university student, and since I don’t have plans for graduate school at the moment, it may be my last summer as a student. Overall, it was quite a busy summer due to two internships.
In my first internship, I got a chance to write a software design document on a PaaS of digital biomarkers. In the process of writing it up, I learned about microservice architecture, which, in simple terms, the way I understood it, structuralizes an application into smaller independent services. I think it resembles a lot with the Unix philosophy, where it tries to make things simple and excel at the one and only task it is given.
In the second internship, I got a chance to work at a company with quite a scale, and it was my first time working surrounded by so many people. It was certainly very different from my previous internships. In other internships, I would just go straight to work on day 1, but on this one, we spent a week on orientation to get to know the history, company values, other interns, and lots and lots about the company. It almost felt like walking into another society inside a society.
During the internship, I developed an internal tool to visualize the statistics of a gNB (5G) Distributed Unit. Although I had taken a course in computer networks, the materials related to 5G were in the lower layers (link layer and physical layer) than what I was familiar with. I liked it a lot since it was very close to hardware, but I think I would need some time to fully grasp what was going on. Thankfully, my project didn’t require full understanding of the subject, so I was able to complete it with ease.
One of the things I noticed was the extensive security procedures to prevent the leakage of valuable company assets. Some procedures that I remember were covering the cameras on my phone and accessing the web through the corporate proxy. It didn’t feel cumbersome, as I know the importance of security, but I think there were still some ways an adversary could get in.
Overall, it was a busy summer. I think it’s true that time flies when you have lots on your hands.