Working at Opera

Happy birthday to Kristine, my fellow in(turn)mate who turned 18 today!

Jorunn, which is kind of the boss of all the interns, came by my office today and asked if I could come to Coro[1] for a short meeting in five minutes. I got a little nervous and thought, "oh no, now she's had a look at my PMS[2] report for last week, and she's not happy!" She felt that I looked a little skeptical, so she assured me again that it would be a very short meeting, before she left.

Five minutes later I walked in the door to Coro as I heard the words "the next person who enters the room", and everyone in the room looked at me. They where maybe about 15 people, and at the front stood Jorunn who looked at me and said that I had to sing a birthday song. The table was full of party stuff and after I sat down, after having talked my way out of having to sing, we all sang the birthday song for Kristine. Well, at least some people sang. Jorunn had set up a great little party with donuts, cinnamon rolls, berliner, "seigmenn", soda, and a crown for the birthday kid. And some of those tubes that pops when you drag in both ends of it (what are they called again?). The tubes contained small nuggets of unfathomable wisdom, like "ideas are like children, you are most fond of your own". Amazing! We had a very nice 30 minutes or so of partying, and we where free to go back to work when we wanted to. All the summer interns got a Opera t-shirt each, and Kristine got a small bottle of Opéra champaign.

It's just too bad that only one of us turns 18 this summer!

[1] Coro is the medium sized meeting room where we where welcomed to Opera, and trained on the first and second day.

[2] No, that's got absolutely nothing to do with bodily fluids of any kind. It's a way to track how much you work on what project. I'll write more about the PMS in another post.

Finally my first day at Opera Software has arrived, and it has been promising.

I arrived at the Oslo headquarter in Waldermar Thranesgate 98 at 9.30, 30 minuttes too early. Let me just say that the chairs in the lobby at Opera are great, and they have a nice selection of fruit, so I had no problem waiting, even though the available reading material was a little limited, and only included some of the most capitalist newspapers in Norway. When I think about it I find it strange that a company proud of having employees from 42 different countries only had norwegian newspapers available for waiting visitors.

Moving on to some more interesting stuff..

At 10 o'clock we where about seven summer interns in the lobby, and we where led into a conference room where we where welcomed and handed a folder with two copies of our contract and the NDA (Non-disclousure Agreement), some info material and some small Opera swag (pen, keychain, button, wristband for mobile phones). We also got a Opera cap each, to really convince us that we wanted to sign the contract and NDA. Which we did. After that we went down one floor and got our picture taken and our ID cards made before we had to sign even some more papers regarding our office computer, which we then had to carry up the stairs and into our offices ourselvs. I don't know if some summer interns share the same office, but I am the sole intern in my office, which I share with at least one person. But judging by the computers there is one or two more people working in this office normally. Right outside of my office there is a small construction site which sometimes means a lot of noise. But I've been equiped with a headset and I have Amie Street, so who cares? I will be working in the mobile devices QA, specifically with Motorola. I'm not 100% satisfied with that, I think Archos, Wii, or Linux desktop would be more fun, but I'm not complaining!

Then we had lunch. And what a lunch! The range of food in the canteen was awesome, and the salad bar had every ingredient you could wish for. I had a delicious salad with lots corn and feta. I think I'm going to be pretty green this summer.

After the lunch it was time for a tour of the place. The headquarter spans three floors, and they are kind of huge. We where told that it is perfectly normal to get lost, I know I have, and will. Then there where some information on how the engineering part of Opera works before Jon, the CEO of Opera came and told us more about Opera as a whole. He seems like a very nice guy. It was especially interesting to see the huge revenue increase Opera experienced after finally releasing a free desktop version of their internet suite. The main source of revenue from the desktop version comes now from their deal with Google, but Jon wouldn't reveal how much they earn that way. Well, at least I didn't ask why they don't just open source the internet suite, as I did with Håkon Wium Lie at his presentation of the OLPC earlier this year. At least Jon admitted that they're not as good as Mozilla, so I guess they get less than $72 million from Google. Why wouldn't Opera be able to consider open sourcing their desktop version with that kind of income possibilities?

After Jon we had a short break before getting a long, and yes, pretty boring, introduction to Opera's bug tracking system (BTS). But I couldn't fall asleep since this is actually what I'm going to work with this summer.. :) But it was mostly quite obvious and familliar from other bug tracking systems I've used.

This was the last joint point on the program. So after that we went to our seperate offices to work on some few, easy tasks to get used to the BTS. That shouldn't take too long I thought at first, but then I noticed that I had to read some guidelines first. I found the guidelines, and they where without end! Actually, I just now realised that it was only the part of the guideline relating to the BTS I had to read first.. Well, then I have at least read them. :)

After reading the guidelines and doing some of the tasks I went to the canteen with one of the other interns and had some food. Only bread this time, but there was still a wide range of "pålegg" (I can't seem to find a decent english word for this) to choose from. After that I've just been surfing around and blogging this. And now I notice that my writing is getting worse and worse, so I will end this post soon.

I just want to mention that all my blogging about Opera Software is restricted by my Non-disclosure Agreement and the Opera Employee Blogging Policies. Still I do feel that I can brag about the fact that I have held a prototype of a Linux based mobile phone in my hands today (a phone which is well known, and it's public information that it's going to have Opera)! That was kind of sweet. Unfortunately I didn't get to play with it too much, becouse of that guideline, but I'll get to play some more with it tomorrow. :)

So it's definetley been an exciting day, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the summer. Please remember to subscribe to my feed if you would like to be kept up to date on how it is to work at Opera Software. Also, if you'd like to read about what other things I care about, feel free to visit my main blog børge forteller om livet (only in norwegian, sorry).

I am very excited about getting this opportunity to work as a summer intern at Opera Software for 8 whole weeks this summer. I'll try to update this blog regularly throughout the summer with posts on how Opera Software is from the inside, if they let me..

My first day at Opera is June 25th. Wish me luck!