Walking through the doors of the Louisville Metro Government IT department on the first day of my internship was intimidating, not exactly knowing what was expected of me. My supervisor, Sharon Meador, greeted me with a smile and spent most of her morning showing me around the building and giving me the chance to meet a large number of the different employees. Each of the many cubical areas contain teams of people who work together with similar positions to complete tasks for the city. Some of the most notable included a web development team who create and manage the content of Louisville's website, a network analyst team who maintain the website and network's performance, and a security team who prevents hacking toward their system. Almost instantly I felt relaxed, knowing that the next eight weeks are going to be a helpful and interesting learning experience as I prepare to figure out which direction I would like to choose with my degree.
After sitting in a staff meeting with the goal to quickly introduce me to some of the current projects, I was placed with the web development team to begin helping out with managing the site content. Eighteen training videos explaining the functionality and settings of Drupal, the platform that the website uses to run, took most of my time on the first day, but made it seamless to come in the next and examine all of the pages on the site and correct errors. The process was lengthy as I took my own notes on outdated links, inconsistent content and styling, but my fresh viewpoint was able to help find small details that others may have missed over time. This particular task was helpful towards my learning development because it gave me the chance to examine and evaluate content relevance while working towards a more refined website result for the public to view. Contacting city department website authors about fixing their content also challenged my communication skills within a business setting.
Today, my supervisor thought it would be beneficial for me to learn about the process of a data push for the website by observing the analyst team. According to the team, a "push" is a process to elevate code to production which helps reduce errors as it is carefully monitored while being completed. Each server of the Metro website has three environments including "User Acceptance Testing", "Quality Assurance", and "Production". It was also helpful to learn that the website follows two models, including one with three branches to move code from branch to branch and the other more popular with two branches to simply move the code straight to Production. The public is then able to view the changes once it reaches Production. The current software makes data pushes slow to complete and can sometimes crash the website. For this reason, the code is updated only once a month. Although there were some aspects that I did not understand, I believe it was good for me to see some of the processes that must take place for the maintenance side in IT.
After sitting in a staff meeting with the goal to quickly introduce me to some of the current projects, I was placed with the web development team to begin helping out with managing the site content. Eighteen training videos explaining the functionality and settings of Drupal, the platform that the website uses to run, took most of my time on the first day, but made it seamless to come in the next and examine all of the pages on the site and correct errors. The process was lengthy as I took my own notes on outdated links, inconsistent content and styling, but my fresh viewpoint was able to help find small details that others may have missed over time. This particular task was helpful towards my learning development because it gave me the chance to examine and evaluate content relevance while working towards a more refined website result for the public to view. Contacting city department website authors about fixing their content also challenged my communication skills within a business setting.
Today, my supervisor thought it would be beneficial for me to learn about the process of a data push for the website by observing the analyst team. According to the team, a "push" is a process to elevate code to production which helps reduce errors as it is carefully monitored while being completed. Each server of the Metro website has three environments including "User Acceptance Testing", "Quality Assurance", and "Production". It was also helpful to learn that the website follows two models, including one with three branches to move code from branch to branch and the other more popular with two branches to simply move the code straight to Production. The public is then able to view the changes once it reaches Production. The current software makes data pushes slow to complete and can sometimes crash the website. For this reason, the code is updated only once a month. Although there were some aspects that I did not understand, I believe it was good for me to see some of the processes that must take place for the maintenance side in IT.