The lowdown on my Summer 'Job'
So life's been pretty busy this past month - I started my awesome new job at Southgate Labs doing web development in Ruby on Rails!
Southgate Labs is Rowan Simpson, Michael Koziarski and Amnon Ben-Orr, and they are top guys in their field. Seriously, it's a fantastic honour to be working alongside people so well respected in the industry. Check the website for more info.
And let's not leave out my awesome co-intern, Amanda. She and I were hired through Wellington's Summer of Tech program. It places students with companies for the summer.
It's seriously such a sweet placement it's hard to call it a job. I love waking up and going to work, which is a great blessing!
My first week there was working on two competition entries for Mix and Mash 2010, a competition to creatively use government data.
The results are out, and both of our entries won their categories!
Amanda and I worked on an entry by ourselves - Tax Receipt 2010 shows how big a piece of pie different govt. departments received from the tax you paid. All of us worked on MP Playing Cards, an iPad app which battles MP against MP.
For the tax calculator I did all the programming, which was basically learning how to use jQuery and finding cool plugins to make it look purdy. I also learnt how to make it look sweet on mobile devices. Amanda did the design side of it. I'm really proud of it!
For the MP Playing Cards I worked with Koz on the Rails backend. My biggest part was implementing an API for the iPad app to call. It was a really nice week of getting to know the languages I'll be using throughout summer.
TV3's Nightline did a story on Mix and Mash which showcased both our entries. You can watch it at http://www.3news.co.nz/Can-you-make-Govt-data-creative/tabid/368/articleID/190365/Default.aspx
Not sure how much I can say about my project, but it's reasonably self led. I've done the planning, milestones, competitor analysis etc. Now I'm about to finish the first iteration, which is quite exciting. Things are on schedule before Christmas so I must have planned pretty well!
I've learnt a lot about developing in Ruby on Rails, and now it's the little things which are starting to catch me out - the quirks I have to get used to. It's a really fun language to use and there's some really nice gems (plugins) to make development a lot easier.
Anyway, Merry Christmas! (Don't forget the reason for the season, btw).
