I got my H-1B visa today.

Just thought you would like to know.

As you might have guessed from the title, this is another geekspeak-heavy post. I’ll try and make it digestible for the less technically inclined, as usual :p

This past week I took part in a course at work, meant to help Amazon employees understand Amazon Web Services (Click here if you don't know what those are). They’re basically a bunch of services that we vend to software developers to use in building applications. Examples of this are the Simple Storage Service (or S3) which is a simple data store which charges users based on how much space they use. There’s also the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a service that lets developers purchase computing time to perform tasks that they can’t do with the resources that they already have (like, say, running complex operations on data sets). In any case, as part of the course, we had to build something using the services that we sell, without access to the internal tools that make our lives easier.

I teamed up with a friend from my team, and we set to work building a system that would allow people to search for MP3 downloads on the Amazon.com MP3 store (shameless plug!) using the lyrics from the song instead of the title or artist name. We did get it working successfully (about half an hour before the deadline), and presented it to the entire class. At the end an award was given out for the best project.

We didn’t win, but it didn’t bother me that much, mainly because of something else I found out from one of the facilitators of the course. Apparently, while testing our code over the weekend, we generated so much traffic to one of the services that the engineer who was on call for the service that week got paged, and had to figure out who or what was creating so many requests to the service.

So, we didn’t win, but we did cause some poor guy to get paged over the weekend.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life that matter. :D

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I’m looking at following szyl_kalimsshar and fatcatlim’s lead and ditching LiveJournal for my own webspace. Not so much because I disagree with their policies, but because I want a lot more control over what I can do with what has essentially become my little corner of the Internet. Does anyone know of any good hosting services? I’m looking at running either WordPress or a Ruby-based content management system called Typo (because Ruby is one of my favourite programming languages). The idea behind running the latter is that I can modify the code if I feel like I need to (I don’t know PHP).

So, any suggestions/recommendations?

17-month OPT extension for F-1 students with US science degrees

This means that I won't have to travel anywhere this year, although I may have to next year depending on how things work out with my H-1B application. Still, it's one less thing to worry about.

Amazon's going to be filing for my H-1B visa on Tuesday.

Just for some perspective, there are 65,000 H-1B visas given out every year to foreigners who want to work in the United states. The actual number of applicants is something like ten times that number, so what USCIS ends up doing is running the applicants through a lottery and picking 65,000 names at random.

Yes, whether or not I get to stay in this country will depend on some programmer's implementation of int rand(). You can probably imagine what I think of this process, so I won't vocalise it.

If I fail to get it with this filing, I can only apply next April...and my existing visa expires on July 9th, meaning I'll have to leave the country. I'll have to do this even if I get the visa (since it only takes effect on October 1st) but in the event of a longer delay I'll have to look at the possibility of moving to another Amazon location. Truth be told, the prospect of having to uproot myself from a fairly comfortable existence isn't really doing much for my peace of mind at the moment. It was easy enough to push to the back of my mind when the date was months away, but now it's pretty much all I'm thinking about.

Maybe I'll try to drown it out with caffeine tomorrow morning.

Just got back about an hour ago.

There was a reorganisation of my group at work about a couple of months ago, and our new boss held an "offsite" for us to get together and discuss possible long-term directions for where we wanted to take our group's products. It was a pretty interesting discussion, although I found that I wasn't quite able to contribute in the capacity that I might have wanted to. Afterwards we went out to dinner at some way-too-expensive restaurant while swapping anecdotes...a good time was had by all.

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One of my recent obsessions has been BBC comedy panel shows, particulary Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Qi. The former is a music-themed panel quiz show with new guests every week, and the latter is a show devoted to dispelling "general ignorance," and is hosted by one of my favourite British actors/comedians, Stephen Fry. Both are hilarious when at their best, and have introduced me to a few more interesting personalities like Bill Bailey and Noel Fielding. Unfortunately, since these shows aren't available through any legal avenues in the US (the BBC does do Region 1 DVD releases, but the most recent show they seem to have is the new series of Doctor Who and Torchwood) I have to watch them though...other means.

It's kind of odd that I find shows like that much more entertaining than most of what shows up on American TV...then again, I haven't owned a television subscription for about a year now, so I probably have no right to make the comparision. I never did watch anything more than Scrubs, Mythbusters and Stewart and Colbert when I did, though. I'm probably missing out, but I really can't give a crap. :P

On a somewhat related note, I looked at the Spring anime season lineup, and there is nothing that looks interesting to me. I might watch Code Geass 2 out of boredom (seeing how I wasn't that impressed with the first season), but that's all. Might be a good idea to go out and get some older series on DVD - I already bought a Vision of Escaflowne boxset, so I might look into other old shows like Cowboy Bebop that are available at a reasonable price.

Watching DVDs on my computer is rather a pain, though.

Apparently LiveJournal just added the ability to cross-post to Facebook from Livejournal, so this post is partly to test that feature. But since I'm here, I might as well write something.

Work is starting to get really hectic, if only because Q4 in a retail business is always a pain. Particularly when you have to make sure the website stays up 24/7. Even more so when you work in the division of the company that manages the hardware and software that runs the website. All in all, it looks to be an, er, eventful fourth quarter ahead. :P

As I mentioned in my earlier entry, Sonic and the Secret Rings for Wii is pretty neat. So far I don't have any deal-breaking complaints with it (and I'm near the end of the game, so I suppose that's a good sign). Definitely the best 3D Sonic game to be released in the last...six years or so, and definitely head and shoulders above the godawful 360 and PS3 Sonic the Hedgehog.

Another game I've been playing as of late is Team Fortress 2. This game almost joined Duke Nukem Forever in vaporware hell, as it was in development ever since Half-Life was released in 1999. It was finally released last month, and happily to say Valve has delivered in spades. The best analogue I can think of is Starcraft, because the two games have very similar design philosophies - delivering unique play experiences. There are nine classes you can play as in TF2, and no two of them play alike. In addition you need to work with your team members who play different classes in order to defeat the other team successfully. It's an incredibly addictive game, and the first multiplayer shooter that has gotten and held my attention in a really, really long time.

Got my legit copy of Sonic Rush Adventure. If anyone wants to play me, my friend code is 4381 9835 8041.

I finally ordered a TV last week (and blew pretty much the rest of my employee discount - we get a 10% discount on all items sold by Amazon.com on the website, but the total discount claimable is capped at $100). It should be here some time next week, giving me some time to track down a set of PS2 component cables and perhaps look at some cable TV subscription plans...although to be honest, the prospect of paying through the nose when I'm not even going to be watching 90% of the channels I get is not particularly enthralling.

I also think it's retarded that I can't get BBC World here, since I'm pretty much of the opinion that it is the only English-language news channel worth watching. This is in spite of the fact that there are quite a few Brits living here in Seattle - heck, a lot of the managers at Amazon are from the UK, including two who work a stone's throw away from my own cubicle.

I'm kind of hoping that IPTV services like Joost take off, so that I can pay for what I want to watch and ignore everything else. I'm not a huge fan of the iTunes video store and (surprisingly) Amazon's own Unbox, because they're encumbered by either excessive DRM or software lock-in (and sometimes both. Yes, I still think iTunes for Windows is a turd).

...that was a pretty weird tangent to go off on.

Work-wise, we're heading into Q4, which is, according to my colleagues, a time of great sorrow at Amazon, because we are a retail business. I imagine the scenery at work is going to look pretty harrowing for the next few months.

And I just got back from work.

Yay.

Got my Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease in the mail today. Borrowed some isopropyl alcohol from a teammate of mine staying in the next block and cleaned off the heatsink and the CPU before applying it and reinstalling the heatsink (I did it properly this time - that thing isn't going anywhere).

The result? My PC idles around 29-30 C, and in games like Phantasy Star Universe it hardly breaks a sweat (the highest it went was around 41 I think). :D

Speaking of PSU, I started playing it today. It does feel more fluid than PSO, although I'm a little irritated that Sonic Team didn't come up with a keyboard/mouse interface for the game. It would have made so much more sense. Heck, they could have just pasted something like WoW's controls onto the game and it would have worked just fine. Then again comparing Sonic Team to Blizzard is pretty much a futile gesture, eh.

As it turns out I'm using my PS2 pad to play the game - it's definitely functional, but every time I want to chat I need to put down the controller, which gets annoying fast.

Game itself is pretty fun though.

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My first week on call is almost over. To those of you who might have forgotten, let me describe what going on call at Amazon.com entails.

Basically, I was handling operational issues for my team this week. What that means is the following:

1. I have to answer technical queries from other developers at Amazon who use our team's software. This is a little daunting because I don't know a lot about the software we write besides generalities.


2. If some of the machines we own (that run our software) go down I need to troubleshoot and bring them back up if possible.


3. On a related note, this can happen at any time of the day, even after office hours or on weekends, so I carry a pager in case a particularly important machine goes down. Once it does I have half an hour to respond from wherever I am (basically, I log in remotely from my work laptop) and fix the problem.


4. The on call person changes every week. Since there are 5 people on my team it'll rotate to me about every month or so.

So yeah. I did some pretty boneheaded things this week (deploying software I wasn't responsible for outside of a scheduled deployment window is probably the most stupid thing I did) but on the whole it went a lot better than I thought it would. It certainly helped that I got a lot of help from my teammates when I didn't understand something.

Six weeks into the new job...I'm hanging in there :)

My living room looks a lot neater now...although there's a ton of empty space I have no idea how to use. Maybe I should lease some living room furniture. Although since I don't have a cable TV subscription (or a TV, for that matter) that might be pretty pointless.

So it's been a week and a half since I started work at Amazon.com. So far I really like the work environment. I completed my first real piece of code for my team yesterday, and will be undergoing a code review for it on Friday. Basically a code review is where you sit down with a bunch of other people and show them your code. Then they take turns telling you why it sucks. Then you go back, make changes and repeat the process until everyone is happy. Needless to say I'm a little nervous, particularly since I've never written anything that will actually be deployed in production environments before.

My team is a bunch of pretty nice people. They're pretty accommodating, particularly when I ask stupid questions and they answer without batting an eyelid. One of them even went to the same junior college as I did in Singapore, and took almost the same subjects I did (he took Further Mathematics instead of my pick of Economics) although he graduated the year before I entered. Quite a huge coincidence, I must say :P

I felt, and still feel somewhat bewildered when I sit at my terminal, simply because when making decisions there are so many things to consider like scalability, reliability and availablity (keeping in mind that this software will be running on machines that MUST be up and running 24/7). It's something that I'm not really used to. They do say that it takes a very long time to get used to the way things work at Amazon, though, as long as a year in some cases. I can see why, particularly when going through the "SDE Bootcamp" they have for new software developers. There are a LOT of established practices and ways of doing things that one needs to come to grips with quickly.

The real fun will begin on August 14th when I go on call for the first time. What being on call entails is holding a pager with you at all times so people running your software can bug you at any time of the day if something goes wrong. I pretty much have to be available 24/7 to respond to these pages within 15 minutes of their being received. Now how's that for excitement?

I have Internet at home!

Random quick look at E3 news I missed:
- Sonic Rush Adventure looks great! Must buy.
- NiGHTS still doesn't really impress me. The funny camera angle is setting off alarms in my head.
- Mario & Sonic looks decent, I suppose.
- What exactly did they change about the PSP Slim? Because I can't see it.
- LOL PS3 price drop! But it's still too expensive for me. Gimped 80GB version makes me lol though.
- Gears of War for PC...I guess I can play it with a better control interface now if I want.
- New MGS4 trailer...ehhh haven't seen it yet. Mainly because I don't want to be reminded about how it's like the only reason I would even consider a PS3 at this point.
- Oh and VF5 360 having better single-player features AND online = punch in the nuts for PS3 owners. Sure it's not going to be perfect, and the high level players are going to avoid it, but it's great to have as an option.

That said...

Work has been pretty reading-intensive so far. Not so much reading documentation as reading stuff about how they develop software at Amazon.com. I've already gotten my first deliverable, but I've been having trouble setting up my development environment. -_-
Hopefully someone in my team can help me with that tomorrow.

No, I don't have Internet at home yet. Today or tomorrow, I think.
Work has consisted mostly of reading so far. There's a ton of stuff I need to get up to speed with...