Nostalgia of the Mind

Wrote this for a 200-250 word MIT essay prompt. It actually comes to more like 901 words. Go figure.

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I walked into the converted warehouse, skittish and sweaty. I paused, my mere 15 years marking me like florescence. I walked among the cubicles, filled with professional people doing professional things with professional-looking computers. And here I was in a light yellow t-shirt and some faded jeans. I shoved my heart back down into my rib cage, and found someone less busy to ask “where Brent was.” They pointed back, and I walked to my new boss’ desk.

I found Brent listening to music while regarding a black screen with green text on it. This black screen with green text, which I now find so familiar, was iconic of my whole experience as unpaid intern at uWink, Inc. I moved from amateur hour into the pro leagues.

uWink, Inc was started by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s, in 2000, and by the time I began working there it had already opened two restaurants. The company operated as a split between software development and restaurants: touchscreens in the restaurant would be used to order food, pay, and play games, and the software team, I now included, would build the custom software and games.

Brent started me off with something light: quality control. I was to play the new games as they were created until my fingers were gnarled like trees out of Dracula. Then, I would write a report on every annoyance, bug, and quirk I found. The funny thing was that I didn’t start my new job during the summer. No, I had the good sense to begin it in December, 2007. Right in time for schoolwork to start getting hard. I would go to school until 3, when one of my parents would give me a 45-minute ride to the uWink offices, where I would work until 7:30 and then walk to the bus-stop. There were days when I would get home at 9 ‘o’clock, just in time to start my homework. But QC, as it was called, was fairly standard stuff. Keep playing until you think you’ve found everything wrong, and then write it up. No, the hard stuff came later, after winter break.

Brent decided that I could move up to work on some of the less-important projects, and so he emailed over a couple of attachments, and said “port this game.” And here it was as if I had jumped out of a kiddie pool onto a cliff, where I sort of tripped and did a hop-step and teetering, fell off, plummeting to my inevitable doom. Yeah, trying to learn seventy-two things at once was, in the most understated way, challenging. When I opened the attachments, it was worse than merely reading a foreign language. It was more like trying to translate instructions to build Ikea furniture from Polish into Russian. Not only did I not know Polish or Russian, but I had no idea how to build furniture in the first place. Needless to say, I was flummoxed.

He had emailed me the source code to a Truth-or-Dare Game, where the computer would read questions off a server and display them to a screen, while keeping track of statistics for each player. It was written in Adobe’s Actionscript 2 (AS2), a now obsolete scripting language; Brent wanted me to port it over Actionscript 3 (AS3). At this point, my knowledge of programming was slightly beyond “hello, world.” It was more like, “click this button to say hello”. I had signed up for this internship because I wanted to study to become a software developer, and this was free on-the-job training. Perhaps, in hindsight, expecting to learn two new languages at once was asking too much of me. But then again, I managed to do it.

I worked about twenty hours the first week learning the syntax of AS2. I went out and bought a book on it, and pored through it after finishing my homework. Gradually, I began to understand what was happening in this mere 350 lines of code. And then I hit a brick wall. I realized that I needed to learn XML and XPATH, two more languages, as well, to learn how to query the server and receive the questions. So I spent another week reading on how to do that. Finally, I decided I would buy a book on AS3 and work through line-by-line porting each line over to AS3, reading up on how to do so as I did.

Three or four weeks after I was given the project, I finally had a finished port. So I decided to try running it. And it promptly crashed, within the first 4 lines of code. This was by far the worst part of the job: I had worked extremely hard on this thing, and it had blew up in my face. The coding god had decided to spit on my hard work. So I spent another week working trying to figure out what had gone so drastically wrong. I labored feverishly over my laptop; I learned why caffeine was a programmer’s best friend. Fueled by determination, disappointment, and a little anger, I worked until my fingers bled and my eyes ran out of their sockets. But, finally, finally, after maybe 5 weeks, working through winter break, obsessing over it like I was getting paid for my work, it worked. January 2, 2008. I still have the email. It was the best day of winter break.