Kevin Zhou's Blog

The Things I Like in Sun St. Petersburg Engineering Center

Another week of wonderful working experience outside Beijing, China. And it's in St. Petersburg Sun engineering center this time.

Firstly, St. Petersburg Sun Tech Day was a great success. It was organized well, attracted, maybe, around 2,500 participants, not only from Russia but aslo from some other countries. I talked to a guy from Ukraine and another folk from Russia, pretty impressive. They both have long time Solaris experiences. Other interesting things? Of couse, cool demos, slides and exciting presentations. Among all the activities, I like the live band and their show most in the evening because all the players, including singer, were from Sun Russia marketing team. What enthusiasm! You can see the picture. Along with the free beer and food provided there, it was kind of hgih. :-) 

Secondly, I like nice office environment and professional atmosphere in Sun St. Petersburg engineering center. I like the wood flooring especially. It gives you nice, warm feeling, not like a bunch of cubicals sitting there, one by one inside a huge space. No offensive. Just a personal opinion. And the receptionist guided me to admin, Anna's office in the first day. Smiling, fast pace woman lab engineer Sevindth showed me the working space which she had set up for me before my arrival! I noticed Natalia worked very efficiently to deal with a lot of logistic work for Sun Tech Day because she sat in the office outside of my office by coincidence. 

The third, Igor and his team manage and support a great shared lab space for several teams in the site.

The fourth, I met an American English teacher, Holly. She teaches English there four hours a day for 5 days a week. She has a six months or a year contract (sorry, I'm getting old) and Sun hires her all way from New York. She is smart that she pulled me to her classroom for about a hour to do an on site English conversation practice with her students, the engineers there. No problem. I was glad to help.

The fifth, I like my experience that I beat the challenge to take metro (US people call it subway) from hotel to Sun engineering office. There was one time when I took the metro to go the opposite direction and I figured out what's wrong finally. It was a little scare, not because of anything else, no offensive again, but the fact that I don't understand Russian, and of course, the occasion that I was asking the direction was kind of funny. However, I made it and people there were nice.

Exciting things outside of Sun office there? A lot of beautiful things to see. Hermitage, definitely, runs the top of the list. Unfortunately, I had only one hour to go there before my leaving for the airport. It's horriblly sorry not to see Hermitage for 4 hours or a whole day because that museum shows you what civilization means in human sociaty.

Posted at 02:17PM Apr 17, 2007 by kzhou in Sun  |  Comments[0]