What I've been up to, August 2010

This summer I had my first "real" job working for Atlassian, riding BART every morning to their office in San Francisco. (Atlassian helps software teams keep track of who's working on what, and which bugs need to be fixed). My goal was to reduce the number of support questions Atlassian receives. I built a tool that reads the text of the support question users are asking, searches our resources and displays relevant links from our FAQ. I also worked on making our support resources user-friendly, and along the way learned much more about user experience, Web usability and web design.

No other industry in America is as dedicated to self-improvement and sharing best practices as Silicon Valley. Firms in the Valley also understand the importance of giving workers a feeling of control; the principle is "Get your work done and we'll take care of the rest." As a general rule, employees in SV can wear what they want, show up when they want and browse to whatever sites they want during work. I enjoyed that level of trust and did my best to repay it through hard work.

My co-workers were all fathers, married, or in a serious relationship and headed that way. At lunch we talked about marriage, parenting and all of the commitments and responsibilities involved: waking up in the middle of the night to take care of the baby, owning a home, picking the right school. Marriage, parenting and the decisions leading to each are fascinating, even if they're not on my short-term roadmap.

I spent most of my summer salary on a trip to the World Cup with three just-graduated friends. I saw the two best games of my life (US vs. Slovenia and US vs. Algeria), the people were friendly, and the atmosphere was electric. South Africa's mineral-heavy economy, high inequality and race/class relationships present a unique set of challenges, and I hope I can return soon.

My internship ended a week ago, and yesterday I returned from a four-day orientation trip, backpacking with freshmen in the Sequoia National Park. It was great to get out in the wilderness, and try to share lessons from four years of college at two schools. Last night all the new freshmen were lured into the quad and then drenched by the returning students.

I continue to work on on boosting my ability to focus, and doing more impressive work in shorter periods of time. I traded my smartphone for a $10 phone from eBay, and I'm canceling my Facebook account. Near the end of the summer, I was able to go the full work day without checking my RSS reader. I wrote about battling the Internet here.

My powers of focus will be tested this fall, when I'll balance a senior thesis, job applications, and maintaining friendships at Claremont McKenna. I'll be taking my first philosophy class, and I hope to compete in the ACM - a national computer science and mathematics competition - in October.

I hope you are doing well. I'd love to hear from you, if you'd like to send me a quick email or phone call to let me know what you're up to. All the best.

Still giving college the old college try,
Kevin