The First Two Weeks

This first post will catalogue the first two weeks of my internship here at Adultswim.com

I started on July 9th with my new hire orientation. It lasted only half of the day and they pretty much let us dive right in after that. At the orientation they went over all of the company policies, the benefits, the security, the company structure, and an overview of companies computer systems. Everything except the benefits discussion was very brief and they let the employees figure most out on their own.

After the orientation, I was picked up by my supervisor, Win Gowland, and brought to the Williams Street building where I will be working. It's across the street from Turner's main Techwood campus in a relatively small 2 story building. Williams Street houses all of Adult Swim's areas including the On Air and Website departments.

The Web team here consists of 15 people. Those 15 are broken up into 3 developers (including me), 5 writers/producers, 3 designers, 2 editors, and 2 managers. I am sharing an office with another intern in the T3 program who works with the On Air side of AS.

My first week here was spent getting used to the various servers, pages, and programs that the .com team uses. Most of that week was spent in what is called the VMA. It is a web app that controls the database of movie files featured constantly at LINK. My job is to, every week, go in and change out all the episodes being played in the video section of the site. A new spreadsheet comes in every Tuesday or Wednesday and I find the ratings and descriptions of each new episode and then go in the VMA and switch out the old episodes with the new ones. After I'm done, we leave it to be published to live on Fridays.

During the first week I was setback a little by my computer. It is old machine with little memory and space left on it. It wasn't re-imaged until the next week, so any small thing I did on it took a long time.

At the beginning of the second week, I was given my own first project. I was to create a professionally styled Myspace page for Williams Street. I was given the design of the page in the form of a PSD. It required a lot of research and testing since I was completely overhauling Myspace's layout and design. There is no official documentation for it so I was left to search the Internet for blogs and random posts that everyday users had written about Myspace. After I figured out the layout and naming conventions for all the elements on the default page, I set out creating the .css file that would control everything. It took me around 2 full days (over a span of 5) to get the page working like I wanted it to. (During the week I was given various minor projects like updating the VMA, migrating files for the new downloads page--LINK--, and updating other small sections of the site.) The test page that I have set up is at LINK. It is now in the approval and content writing stages by other members of the team and I'm waiting to fully deploy it.

That ended my first two weeks at AS.com. I thoroughly enjoying it and can't wait to work on more projects.