Coffee, Spreadsheets, Eat, Sleep

Hello Rossers!

So it has been again two weeks since my last post. I am right in the midpoint of my internship which means my midpoint review is due this Friday and I am writing this post before that so I will not know if they “recommend” me for future opportunities at Microsoft Corporation (hopefully I will have a nice weekend with a “yes”).

These couple of weeks have been interesting, we are finally getting to a point with the agency where we are all comfortable with what they are developing, drafts have been presented and approved (or at least not vetoed) by senior management, the rest of the team has been a bit late on presenting what I need (I guess part of being an intern is having to make other people work *for* you when you are an intern) so this last week I have been stalking all of them (since before I was stalking the agency). The project is going well and if nothing (bad) happens we will be online with the campaign in early August just a couple weeks before I have to (sadly) leave.

One of the things that MS encourages its interns to do is to go and talk to people around the organization, so this week I decided to go and do that. I went and talked to a Group Program Manager to understand what they do, how they do it and how they relate to the marketing team. It was fun (and interesting) to learn how they do work, how they plan it and then how they develop it (though PMs are considered part of the engineering team they are more of a business part of engineering and the liaison between marketing and developers/testers). They write the specifications for any given feature and it was interesting to see on how they have to think about a problem to be able to solve *every* possible outcome (decision trees!! Remember them? They do come in handy).

Other than that, I had a very nice 4^th of July (if you end up in Seattle, you should go to Bainbridge Island it is not amazing, but the ferry ride is nice and only $7 and they have an amazing ice cream shop – Mora) and I will be waiting for my review (if things go like I feel they are going then I should have a nice weekend) and enjoy the weekend!

See you all in two weeks!!

Gabriel.