18

Author: hwisu

public/static/resume.pdf

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+---
+title: "three internships"
+date: 2025-07-24
+tags: ["career", "backend", "love"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+I never meant to rack up three internships when I first started out.
+
+**Internship #1 – Platfarm (tiny startup)**
+My first gig was at a small outfit called *Platfarm*, where I did Android dev work. The team was busy road‑testing new tech, and the assignment that sticks with me was building an open‑source neon‑glow effect (we leaned on `ffmpeg`; wrangling the licenses was tougher than the actual effect). I cranked out code for a bunch of other pilots too. Overall it was a solid experience—they even offered me a full‑time position. But the day‑to‑day felt pretty different from what I’d imagined an internship would be, so I figured I should try a totally different track next.
+
+**Internship #2; Smilegate (big game studio, server side)**
+For round two I jumped into server work at Smilegate, one of the biggest game companies in Korea (and globally). They’d carved out a newbie‑friendly program where interns ship a small project end‑to‑end. Building backend services was a blast, and I stayed tight with the friends I met there. The downside? Game studios run on serious overtime—the on‑site sauna was always lit, which told me everything. (Silly as it sounds, that’s when I decided I’d rather chase startups than AAA games.)
+
+**Internship #3; Netmarble (AI team)**
+Next up was Netmarble’s AI team. We prototyped all sorts of stuff to get AI into production. The project that actually made it to live servers was a reinforcement‑learning–based anti‑cheat system. We also tried voice synthesis with Tacotron, but the quality was meh. Looking back, speech synthesis feels like a problem half the startups on Earth are now tackling; makes me wonder if we could’ve pushed it further. Doing an “AI internship” sounded cool, but I learned that if you want real AI work you either (a) grind through grad‑school‑level theory and papers, or (b) own the data pipelines/clean‑up side. I’d sampled the data‑wrangling bit—not my cup of tea—and grad school didn’t call to me.
+
+**What I figured out**
+Hopping across those fields made my tastes crystal clear—kind of like dating. I love the conceptual side: analysing a problem, turning ideas into code, and then iterating to make it faster and cleaner. I like that backend code tends to stick around and matter. Long story short: servers are my thing.

src/content/posts/18.three-internships.md

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 %==================== EDUCATION ====================
 \sectionheader{Education}
-B.Sc. Computer Engineering, 2019\hfill (KAIST \+ Academic‑Credit‑Bank)\\
+B.Sc. Computer Engineering, 2019\hfill (KAIST \& Academic‑Credit‑Bank)\\
 ICPC programming club; coursework in Algorithms, OS, HCI.
 
 %==================== COMMUNITY ====================