My first week as an intern!

This is the first of the weekly posts I am going to be sharing with you about my experience working with Ed during the 9 weeks of my summer internship. I will try to post as frequently as possible but I will produce a post at least once a week to let you know about the progress I make and the plans we have for the coming weeks. Before I say more about how the first week of my first ever internship has been, I thought I’ll introduce myself and my background (only briefly).

Introduction

I was born in Hungary where I spent the first 19 years of my life living in Budapest. It is a great city to visit and there is a lot more to it than just eating Goulash :). In 2005, after finishing secondary education in Hungary I moved to the UK to learn English. I always wanted to study at university but as a 19 year old guy in a new country enjoying his freedom and doing what most 19 year olds want to do, I did not think much about going back to school. After some years working in a restaurant I realised that something was missing from my life, so I decided that I will pursue my childhood interest (which is, of course, computers). So I went to college to gain an IT Diploma after which I faced the biggest challenge of my life, studying computer science at university level. So here I am, a student at the University of Bristol starting my third year in September. Never been happier (and more exhausted)!

Never been happier (and more exhausted)!

My first week

These first few days with FlingOS have been very exciting. In only four days, I learned more about operating systems development than I did in my entire life. We covered topics, such as Booting, Initialisation, Memory Management and Interrupts. We have started to produce resources for the tutorial videos and articles which are planned to be released by the end of the summer so you can have a go at developing your own operating system as well. Producing the resources for the tutorials is a great way for me to learn about OS development. Most of the implementations we looked at are done in assembly language with which I’ve had some experience from previous university courseworks but definitely not at this level. Learning more about how to program in assembly is a great way of realising how the actual hardware works and how the computer is able to generate useful applications for the user from all those ones and zeros.

Future Plan

It is planned that I will be spending the first three weeks of the internship learning about FlingOS and OS development in general, mainly focusing on the x86 architecture on which FlingOS is based. At the end of the three week training period we will have the scripts with all the resources (code snippets, diagrams) ready so the production of the tutorial videos can be under way. The remaining six weeks will be spent on the development of FlingOS, more specifically writing device drivers using C#. I am really looking forward to the coming weeks to learn more from Ed and to make contributions to the project.

I would like to end this week’s post with a thank you to Ed for giving me the opportunity and taking me on-board, also a huge thanks to Imagination Technologies® for supporting the project and making this internship possible for me.

See you very soon and please check back for updates…
Roland