So I'm at home in Montana now, just for a few days-- Saturday 8/25 through Friday 8/31. I had the opportunity to judge at the Last Chance Grand Prix Trial for Grand Prix - San Francisco on Friday, which was fun; the TO was generous enough to let me serve as scorekeeper (a role that can be either extremely helpful, with a good scorekeeper, or extremely damaging, with a bad one, to the tournament) for the eight simultaneous tournaments, which gave me some valuable experience-- and I was able to do a bit of floor judging as well, near the end.
So it seems that, at the end of a summer's internship, one ought to write some sort of summary of the experience. So then, I've entitled mine "SunSet" in the spirit of Sun's *amazingly* bad puns-- SunScreen for the firewall and background check, SunDial for the HR group, SunRay for the thin clients, etc.
"So how was Sun?" Well, Sun was an interesting experience. Sun is a company filled with brilliant and famous people-- from Whit Diffie (who invented public key cryptography, and therefore much of the Internet as we know it), whom I had the privilege of meeting and speaking to a couple of times, to Darren Reed (who created ipfilter, and is therefore also responsible for a large bit of the Internet as we know it), who was actually on the same team (Solaris Security) as I was. And many others. I was fortunate to be able to meet a huge number of great people at Sun, and when I got to sit and speak with them, it was truly an experience-- from asking Diffie why he had said he was unconcerned about cryptography after the rise of quantum computing, to being able to discuss my own research with one of the Sun Fellows (the extremely elite class within Sun), and a thousand other similarly exhilarating experiences.
When I think back on those moments, Sun seems, to me, to be a company even more filled with possibility than its fearless leader says it is. If you put all those brilliant people in a company together, surely it's going on to do great things.
The thing I noted, though, was how different Sun was from my last internship at VeriSign. It'd be too easy to just say that it's because VeriSign has only about 1/10th the population-- there's a significant difference in culture, attitudes, and how work gets done between the two companies. This runs through every area of the companies-- from Sun's hard-sided ("real") offices for every employee (even their interns!) compared to VeriSign's cube farms (but nice cube farms), to VeriSign's emphasis on corporate strategy and directed synthesis of bits of its organization, as compared with Sun's unofficial motto of "let a thousand flowers grow." (This, of course, referring to how Sun wants to give its engineers enough freedom to develop new, brilliant, and unexpected ideas, such as DTrace and ZFS.)
Which one is better? Well, that, of course, is the $10M question. But I don't think it's as simple a question as it would seem-- especially not for me. I do think that Sun's environment helps to recruit the very most experienced people-- ones who don't want to only work under direct orders from higher up the management chain. I do think that VeriSign's coherence of action makes for a strong company. There are obviously advantages to both companies; for my part, being able to learn from both styles of corporation has been very interesting-- and will greatly shape the sort of company for which I choose to work in the future.
*How* it will shape that choice, of course, remains to be seen.
August 2007 Archives
(Yes, it's another post primarily about Magic. But it's an exciting one!)
So yes, I'm blogging more on a best-effort basis than with any regularity. But I did mention that there might be something more exciting happening with Magic and I in the next few weeks-- and it has now actually happened.
Those of you who are familiar with how good a player I actually am at Magic might have wondered, looking at the list on the last post-- "Why is Brendan, no great shakes as a Magic player, going to all these fancy tournaments?" Well, I now have an answer that I am pleased to share. When I went to my first Friday Night Magic this summer, I happened to meet a judge who was playing at the tournament. I had previously given some thought to the judging program, but hadn't made any firm decisions about it; however, when I heard that he was not only a judge, but a judge of sufficiently high level to mentor a new judgeling for the program, I decided to make his acquaintance.
Before I get too far, I should explain that Magic and the DCI (the tournament organization for Magic) recognize five levels of judges, conveniently numbered 1 (the lowest) through 5 (the highest). Level 1s are fully certified judges. Level 2 adds a mentoring capacity-- the ability to teach new judgelings the ropes; it also shows more extensive rules and guidelines understanding. Level 2 is the lowest level to be on the floor of a Pro Tour. Level 3 adds the power to make new judges, as well as more mentoring roles; these judges are Head Judge at important tournaments. Levels 4 and 5 are very prestigious; they have international mentoring roles, often have management roles in the DCI, consult with Wizards on how Magic should be made, etc. Level 4s are often Head Judges at Grand Prix, and Level 5s, at Pro Tours. If you're curious about numbers: DCIX, the website for DCI judges, shows that at the moment there are 1484 L1, 459 L2, 85 L3, 7 L4, and 6 L5 judges in the world.
So then, the judge I ran in to at FNM was not just "high enough" to help mentor; he was, in point of fact, a Level 4 judge-- one of seven in the world. He was kind enough to be willing to take on a new judge trainee, and said that I should start at once-- preferably tomorrow, as he was to head judge California Regionals and was understaffed.
So then, I've spent a great deal of time this summer learning from different judges, at different tournaments, as well as playing at smaller tournaments. As of Friday evening, I was listed as having judged (as a Level 0 trainee):
- 1 Regional Championships (California - San Jose)
- 6 Pro Tour Side Events at Pro Tour - San Diego 2007
- 1 Grand Prix Trial
Hello!
Time seems to pass at a staggering rate. I'm just about to begin week 10 of 12 of my internship at Sun Microsystems-- and when I last wrote, I was in week 8.
What happened in the last week and a bit? Well, I did four days of training at ActivIdentity, learning to use their Card Management Software, which, if not precisely enthralling entertainment for most people, was certainly an interesting experience for me-- especially given my previous internship at VeriSign, doing much the same work. I also went to San Francisco to see some friends from my high school.
I also made a portrait of myself using a creation tool, in the style of a famous TV show-- much to the chagrin of my parents, who think I should have more formal pictures of myself on my website.
Also, a variety of other small things, some of which will no doubt be blogged about eventually-- but right now, I wanted to put something in here about Magic.
Magic: The Gathering is a card game that has been going on for more than fifteen years at this point, more popular now than ever before. I used to play it, but gave it up more than a decade ago-- for reasons that were no doubt good and wholesome at the time. So why does it come up now?
Well, as some of you may know already, a lot of my friends at Hopkins play it. And clearly, my group of friends are the cool people. 'Cause I'm not friends with uncool people. :-) So I thought, I want to be cool like my friends: I want to get back into Magic. So I had my parents dig my old collection out of my closet, and send me a time capsule from my eighth-grade self.
Now, eight months later, I've learned a lot more about Magic, played in a lot of tournaments, gotten at least one friend newly addicted, and met a lot of new friends-- which has happened through getting to attend a number of fun tournaments. Since the beginning of the summer, I've attended:
Also, a variety of other small things, some of which will no doubt be blogged about eventually-- but right now, I wanted to put something in here about Magic.
Magic: The Gathering is a card game that has been going on for more than fifteen years at this point, more popular now than ever before. I used to play it, but gave it up more than a decade ago-- for reasons that were no doubt good and wholesome at the time. So why does it come up now?
Well, as some of you may know already, a lot of my friends at Hopkins play it. And clearly, my group of friends are the cool people. 'Cause I'm not friends with uncool people. :-) So I thought, I want to be cool like my friends: I want to get back into Magic. So I had my parents dig my old collection out of my closet, and send me a time capsule from my eighth-grade self.
Now, eight months later, I've learned a lot more about Magic, played in a lot of tournaments, gotten at least one friend newly addicted, and met a lot of new friends-- which has happened through getting to attend a number of fun tournaments. Since the beginning of the summer, I've attended:
- Eight Friday Night Magic Events
- The California Regional Championships
- Pro Tour - San Diego
- Worldwide Magic Game Day
- One Summer of Magic Event
- And, just today: 1 Grand Prix Trial at Eudemonia
