Will Anderson

I’m ready to go. All of my things are packed and in a matter of hours I’ll be heading to Sea-Tac airport to fly back to Terre Haute. It’s been a great summer.

It really feels like this summer has flown by for me. I find it hard to believe that it was really 3 months ago that I last posted here. It’s been good though. I ended up working on the adCenter Desktop team at Microsoft. It’s just about the only team in the Online Services Department (OSD) whose main product is not a web client. My internship with Microsoft was as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) so much of my responsibility on the adCenter Desktop team was writing up and automating test cases. It may not sound like the most thrilling work, but I enjoyed it, and learned a lot while doing it. I plan to return to Microsoft next summer for a second internship, though I’ll likely be on another team (hopefully still in OSD). I look forward to being back in the Northwest.

The thing that has wowed me the most about this area of the country is how green everything is. Bushes, flowers, and trees seem to adorn every lawn and office park. It’s hard to precisely describe the difference between this area and the Midwest, but I think the best way to put it is to say that here, cultivating greenery is the norm, rather than the exception. Not everything is like this, of course. Seattle itself seems a little dirtier and grayer than the surrounding area, but even with it’s trash littered sidewalks and swarms of hobos, it has a certain classic charm.

I actually only visited Seattle a handful of times when I was here. I lived in Kirkland and worked in Bellevue, which are both on the other side of Lake Washington. Living in Kirkland was really nice. The area is nice, and downtown Kirkland is only a few minutes away, affording access to a wide variety of shops and restaurants, as well as docks and a beach overlooking Lake Washington.

Bellevue is a pretty cool city to work in. Unlike Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, most of the office buildings are fairly new, and are built to provide lots of natural light. With lots of restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance, it’s always easy to find a bite to eat. There is also a fairly direct transit route from Kirkland to Bellevue, which made it easy to ride the bus to work (and I did almost every day).

Toward the end of the summer, I got to go to a WordPress meetup that was being held in Seattle. I got to meet a bunch of people including Joshua “Red” Russak of First Time Online and Nick Ohrn of Plugin-Developer.com. Nick is a Rose alumni who has been freelancing in Seattle for the two years since he graduated. We had been planning to meet sometime this summer to talk WordPress, and he is the one who told me about the WordPress meetup. We actually ended up meeting the next day at a coffee shop and I had a great time telling him about what I’d been working on and hearing about the stuff he’s been doing. I look forward to doing some WordPress projects for him during the upcoming school year (which is what we actually met to discuss). I also got a chance to talk with Joshua this week and discuss doing some work for him as well. Suffice it to say, it’s going to be a busy school year, but I look forward to it.

How about you? What has your summer been like?