I am currently interning with Cisco Systems in San Jose. Just the break I had been hoping from academia as I was this close to snapping. Perfect weather and interesting work with awesome benefits, I don’t think I can ask for any more from a internship this perfect.

The specific group I am working in Cisco for is known as the STG, or the Security Technology Group. This is great as my primary focus lately had been network security. Everyone is very friendly and quite passionate about their projects which I thought was only present in small start up companies. Then again Cisco can be thought of as a grown up start up, so it’s still got the soul of one. The main project I will be working with related to Automated Signature Extraction from worm and virus outbreaks. Other than that I will be working on maintaining security related components in the IOS as thats what the STG is responsible for as well.

Cisco really pampers their employees and interns. I was surprised to find that as interns we are equally treated as full time employees regarding to the type of work we are doing and the benefits we are receiving. All receiving nice ThinkPad laptops, unlimited beverages at work (lots of soda and juices, many flavors tea, coffee, water, hot chocolate…), gym and sports facilities, awesome cafeterias on campus and the list goes on and on. Along with a nice compensation, I can’t think what else to wish for. The free drinks has been my favorite so far. There are about 40 huge buildings in the Cisco campus and their all beautifully landscaped with basketball courts and volleyball courts scattered in between. Ping-pong, pool and foosball games within building helps everyone keep their sanity levels normal during high stress work. Tech related stuff can be quite stressfully and I assume all these are to keep everyone sane, which equals to better productivity and happy employees.

My first few days were all about getting used to the Cisco IOS Source building enviornment. Cisco has a array of their own tools and their own version control system to help the thousands of developers work on the same code base seamlessly which is amazing. In the main source tree, doing a “ls” is a bad idea… imagine so many items it takes a while for it to display. The process of getting even a few lines into the IOS is a very systematic and long process involving many checks, automated checking and testing, peer reviews and more testing. I just committed my few lines of code in to the Cisco IOS last week in the form of a bug fix which I think is insanely awesome!

For those who don’t know what Cisco IOS is, it’s the operating system almost all Cisco Routers use, and almost all internet related networking products that backbones and ISP’s use are Cisco. In simple words, the internet you use is driven in majority part by Cisco IOS running products.

Well It’s getting late, I will post some pictures and more info some other time. Enjoy!