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My Internship

I've been sitting on this for a while, so I thought I would share.

I've just begun an internship with Mozilla. I'm working as a platform engineer for FireFox on Android. Today was my first day, and I am very impressed with the company.

One really cool part of this experience, for me, is that I am finally in the presence of people who know a thing or two about computers. For once in my life, I can finally have a face-to-face conversation about things like language bindings, or emscripten, or the Google NDK. I hate to say it, but you really can't get a thing like that in Alaska. I even had a talk with another intern who is working on porting SDL2 to emscripten--something I have wanted for a long time!

Funny thing, I got the idea to apply for an internship with Mozilla from reading Chad Austin's ancient blog posts, about how he got an internship with Netscape and was really impressed with them. Another funny thing, I'm certain that it was my work with TurboSphere and related projects that gave me the knowledge and skills to manage this. For all the things you can say about Sphere, it certainly can be said that it helps people move to bigger and better things!

Re: My Internship

Reply #1 –
Hey man congrats on your internship! I myself never had an internship and would have really loved to have one. I'm currently employed as a web/.,NET developer/IT technician at a company doing all kinds of things. It's alright I guess, but I needed this job experience to 'move up' so to speak.

My dream job would be something in game development. Whether it's tools for game development or the design and architecture of a game. But there aren't many good game company's near where I live. They are further north in Washington or far south in California. So at least I have proximity which is a good thing.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.

Sphere-sfml here
Sphere Studio editor here

Re: My Internship

Reply #2 –
Hey, thanks!

Proximity isn't everything, mind you. I came all the way from Alaska to California for this!

And my one complaint is that it is too, too hot down here.

I would love to do game dev work too...but if I'm honest, the real reason I enjoy that kind of thing is to see the systems all working together, something quite complicated all working in real time (ish), and still needing to be aesthetically pleasing as well. Honestly, working on a web browser is, to me, easily close up there with game dev work.

Re: My Internship

Reply #3 –
Whoa, Mozilla! I don't suppose they were shocked to hear that there's still a techinically active game engine that uses SpiderMonkey? ;)

Anyways, congrats and I hope the internship leads to big things! Maybe this will also lead to advancements in Sphere (mobile version???) ?

Re: My Internship

Reply #5 –
I do find it queer that jester, with all of his Google v8 knowledge made an impression on Mozilla. Google has just as good an internship programme as anywhere else web dev related.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.

Sphere-sfml here
Sphere Studio editor here

Re: My Internship

Reply #6 –
Google wasn't interested when they heard my major. Mozilla was more concerned with what I knew and what I was interested in learning. Not to bash Google, I totally understand why they made that decision. But it does outline why I generally should be gearing towards less-than-Google-sized companies!

Even given that I have spoken on numerous occasions with the V8 developers, and had one of my patches to V8's build system accepted, Google didn't even give me a chance. But they are a bigger company, so I can see why Google wouldn't bother with anyone who isn't a CS or BA/BM major, while Mozilla had the time to get to know me and see what I was actually like  :)

It's not that Google doesn't have a good intern program, it's just that their hiring process is not a good fit for someone like me.

Once they actually started talking to me, the people I've talked to at Mozilla were impressed that I understood the underlying concepts of V8 and JS VMs in general (possibly the fact that I had to accurately communicate how V8 worked to someone from Mozilla, who wasn't familiar with V8's code but did know a thing or two about SM made it more impressive), as well that I had written threaded programs and have a good understanding of thread-safe memory management and concurrent programming in general. And with TurboSphere, I had a solid example to show of my skills.

When I told them about Sphere, they were curious about my impressions of SM versus V8. I had to tell them that I have not had a very...modern experience with SM, unfortunately.

I certainly hope that with what I learn, I will be able to finally make Android a working target for TurboSphere! I've also considered trying to port Sphere 1.6 to it--I've already got FJ-GL working with GL ES 2 from my time with a Raspberry Pi, and it should be even easier than with TurboSphere, given that it uses a true interpreter.

Also thanks to this internship, I can finally test TurboSphere on OS X, and I could theoretically make an iOS build. But of course, the iOS build would require a jail-broken phone. Apple is not amused by dynamic JIT compilers.