Xerox PARC

Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is the world-wide renowned research center, famous for the invention of the graphical operating system, the LAN and the laser printer. It was the origin of the Silicon Valley in California, and, of course, I just had to work there one day. This dream became reality, and I joined the Human Document Interaction (former: Graphics and Interaction Research) group.

I helped to create a new user interface for an innovative document service over the Internet. For example, it would upload an image into the system, and then perform optical character recognition and transform it into a PDF file, print it out 5000 times, bind it and ship it to you overnight. I also developed the interface to track these shipments together with FedEx. This job allowed me to gain insights into one of the best research institutes in the world, and I also got experience with back-end software of large Internet services. The best part of it, however, was that I was able to work with some of the world's best experts in their disciplines, for example, I was once stuck with the implementation of an HTML upload tag, but not a problem: I asked some of my colleagues, and I found out that the original inventor of this tag, who wrote the actual specification, was sitting two doors down from me.