At the start of this week, I began to notice the head of the website development team is expanding his trust with me as I was made a site administrator on their Drupal platform. This means that I have full access to creating and modifying all content on the city of Louisville’s website, which is an impressive accomplishment if I say so myself. Anytime an employee from a different department of the city emails my supervisor about errors or confusion within pages of the site, they will be forwarded to me and I am expected to address these problems. Since the site is consistently updated each day by a large number of authors, I expect that there will always be something for me to fix throughout the rest of my internship at Metro Government. For example, I’ve learned that an exposed email address on a page is targeted by spam robots. In order to prevent junk email for the company, a contact form should be embedded for site users. One of my main tasks this week was to learn about Wufoo, a site owned by Survey Monkey, to create and manage contact forms for the city. The drag-and-drop interface made it easier to put together sections that would increase site efficiency and functionality for users. I imagine learning about this tool was important because embedded features such as contact forms are essential for web development and will be helpful for me to know in the future.
Although I am temporarily working for the company, most of the employees have made a large effort to keep me included by inviting me to meetings. The director of the IT department held an assembly this week to update on the company progress. Even though most of the information was about employee offered incentive programs and reaching set corporate goals by a certain date, I was able to see how an annual budget affects the different teams based on how much is contributed to particular projects. This goes on in any job field in the professional world and I believe this will help me be prepared for the business setting.
Throughout the week, most of Metro Government has been focusing on their strategic plan for the upcoming fiscal year. When nearly all of the usual people I work with left the office to attend required seminars, I got the chance to spend time shadowing the hardware side of IT. A man named Jim Baker works at the help desk, answering telephone calls for technology help. At times, he rides around the city to address service orders for all city departments. When I tagged along, old computers and other technology were upgraded at Metro Animal Services. While we were there, the director and I got to discuss particular aspects of the Animal Services page that could be improved and I will be working on throughout the next few weeks. At a police station, I helped unpackage and setup new desktop monitors and saw computer labs in the training facilities. The hardware side of IT is completely different from software, but I learned how much this position is depended on to make all of the technology works together when parts fail. I also enjoyed getting to meet some of the people I have contacted in person and seeing what their department does for the city.
Although I am temporarily working for the company, most of the employees have made a large effort to keep me included by inviting me to meetings. The director of the IT department held an assembly this week to update on the company progress. Even though most of the information was about employee offered incentive programs and reaching set corporate goals by a certain date, I was able to see how an annual budget affects the different teams based on how much is contributed to particular projects. This goes on in any job field in the professional world and I believe this will help me be prepared for the business setting.
Throughout the week, most of Metro Government has been focusing on their strategic plan for the upcoming fiscal year. When nearly all of the usual people I work with left the office to attend required seminars, I got the chance to spend time shadowing the hardware side of IT. A man named Jim Baker works at the help desk, answering telephone calls for technology help. At times, he rides around the city to address service orders for all city departments. When I tagged along, old computers and other technology were upgraded at Metro Animal Services. While we were there, the director and I got to discuss particular aspects of the Animal Services page that could be improved and I will be working on throughout the next few weeks. At a police station, I helped unpackage and setup new desktop monitors and saw computer labs in the training facilities. The hardware side of IT is completely different from software, but I learned how much this position is depended on to make all of the technology works together when parts fail. I also enjoyed getting to meet some of the people I have contacted in person and seeing what their department does for the city.