Ah, the Rewards of the Internship!

Heavy on Learning and the Fun

July 30, 2007

Sheila Faris-Penn, director of web communications for University Advancement, is spending seven weeks as an application developer intern at Warner Bros. Worldwide Television Marketing’s New Media Division, thanks to a Staff Development Award she received this spring.

Inside Online asked Faris-Penn to provide a weekly blog about the experience. This is her sixth submission.

Week 6

Back on the DAMM Back End

If you read last week’s blog, you remember that I had finally moved over from the Digital Anthology of Marketing Materials (DAMM) Content Management System (CMS, or “back end”) over to the client side (the “front end,” or what most people will see). I got a couple of things done, then came crashing into a data problem. We originally thought that we could move on and finish it later, but we couldn’t test the front-end pages until the data was complete. So back we went to the DAMM back end.

I was both disappointed and pleased – the former because the front-end posed new learning experiences. Pleased, because I’d been feeling guilty that I’d had to leave such large pieces of the DAMM CMS unfinished. I spent several days adding the missing component, then returned to the front end. The things that remain on the back end are mostly clean up and some things to make it more user friendly, so I feel better about letting it go and moving on. But we’re going to have to work fast to complete the client side!

Harry Potter Family Screening

Warner Bros. offers their permanent employees a really cool benefit: family screenings of new movies. Although my temporary ID wasn’t enough to get me in, each employee is allowed to bring three friends or family members, and one of the New Media employees invited my husband and me to attend with her. So on the first Saturday of the opening week, we were able to attend a free screening of the new Harry Potter movie.

It was held at the AMC 16 in Burbank, early on a Saturday (the movie started at 9 a.m.), and the line to get in formed long before that. The line went all the way around the city block. But there was no problem getting in – they just kept opening up theaters inside until everyone was seated. We got our free popcorn and soda, took our seats and had a really great time. It was definitely worth driving into Burbank on a Saturday!

Looping, Hash Tables, Dictionaries and Stored Procedures

One of the hardest pages on the front end involved taking values from several data tables and formatting them “on the fly.” The page was almost entirely developed each time it was requested, getting its information from the database. We spent some time studying which controls would be best for this process, then set about working it out.

So the web page was generated each time it was called, and the process was to:

1. retrieve the information from database (basic – and some complicated – SQL)
2. loop through the retrieved data tables to pack it into the a format that was easier to use (hash tables and a dictionary item)
3. loop back through the dictionary to unpack the information into a dynamically generated html table to present to the user.

It took me several days to learn and then get it to work, but I did it. Woo hoo!

Then we found out that we hadn’t “packed” enough information into the dictionary item – they wanted an image, too. Sigh. It was almost back to the drawing board, but we were able to find a way to make this process continue to work. Whew.

Later that week, feeling good about my abilities, I took on something that was way over my head – a complicated SQL statement to retrieve something out of the database. I had gotten a stored procedure to run earlier, so decided I could figure this out too.

Nope.

I got part of it done, but then realized that it was way over my head. The big mistake was that I spent too much time AFTER this realization still trying to figure it out. I should have asked for help sooner, especially with so little time left to get everything done before my internship would be over. Lesson learned: ask for help when you need it!

The People on the Bus

I actually began to look forward to the commute each day. I had met some really interesting people on the trains and the bus, and talking to them each morning was a lot of fun. There are a lot of people from the Fullerton area who work in Burbank – who knew?

I didn’t meet as many Warner Bros. folk as I did ABC/Disney folk, which surprised me. I guess I just fell into the “wrong crowd” <grin>.  I met the finance director for ABC Cable Networks Group, the IT director for the Writers Guild of America, a senior media manager for KABC-TV, and a photo librarian for the Walt Disney Company. I did meet some great WB folk, though, including some from IT and from security. But those people I met first at Warner Bros. and then discovered I’d been riding the train with them all along!

I’d meet them in line to get onto the first train, where we’d grab whatever seat was available on the crowded train. On the second train, we’d ride together and someone would always bring the horoscope for us to read out loud. It also was fun to talk to them about what they did – I learned a lot about the TV industry. These folk  took me under their wing, so when it came time to try to run for the earlier train (better connection), I’d know where to go (shaved 10 minutes off the commute time if we made it). I’m going to miss this part – if not the three hours every day that I’m away from my family.

Week 7 Previews

Warner Bros. Museum
Finally Some Style
Needing More Time
Saying Goodbye

Week: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven