Anant Narayanan

No other internship has been ever so satisfying: over the summer, I worked on a wide range of mini-projects which allowed me to exercise skills ranging from systems to application level programming. I even did a bit of work in the mobile space (turns out programming in limited memory and processing speed is a *lot* different). As an intern at Mozilla Labs, I got to work on the very bleeding-edge and was involved with two exciting projects: Weave and Jetpack.

For Weave, I wrote a server-side component to perform decryption of weave records, which may be useful in scenarios where decryption is too expensive on the client. I also wrote a proxy server for fetching favicons, this would allow remote clients to fetch favicons for an arbitrary number of URLs without compromising on their privacy – the request and response would all be over HTTPS to Mozilla’s servers. We also made 3 major releases during the course of the summer (0.4, 0.5, and 0.6) and each release involved a variety of bugfixes and performance improvements.

For Jetpack, my primary focus was on exposing simple Javascript based media APIs for audio, video and music. For this project, I wrote three binary components to allow Javascript applications and Jetpack running in the browser to record and manipulate audio and video streams, encoding them into Ogg/Vorbis or Ogg/Theora files, and to allow them to query and control the locally installed media player (our first target was iTunes).

As you can see, my summer was filled with challenging tasks and I was given the opportunity to work in 5 different programming languages (C, C++, Objective-C, Javascript and PHP) both on the client and server-side. It’s hard for me to imagine any other company in the world where an intern would be given so much responsibility and intellectual stimulation. It was also great to have so many *really* smart people around to fall back on when I ran into nasty code problems.

But work was not all we did. Along with my fellow interns, I watched well over 15 movies and 150 episodes of random TV shows, visited a whole bunch of new places around the bay area (and beyond!), had barbecue parties on lazy Sunday evenings, watched a baseball game, did a bit of canoeing, ate food from almost every cuisine in the world, and even managed to advance from level 1 to 59 in World of Warcraft. Need I say more?