Work that doesn’t suck

weird wheels-  by Radebaugh

An internship diary by Chris Newton. Chris took part in Dharmafly’s first summer internship, when three students joined us at the Lab for the Recently Possible to gain skills in developing experimental web applications. Some of their observations and reflections are posted in this blog.


July 2012 – week 3

So, since I’m into my third week of my shiny new internship, let’s take a moment and reflect. What have I been doing? Well there are lots of little bits of JavaScript that I never knew were there before, be them forEach loops on the server or _.each loops on the client, JS is gradually getting easier to write.

At the moment I’m working on several projects, but two stand out for me. Firstly I’m getting stuck into Node.js and am in the process of writing a social graph API in the environment. It basically works likes this: you provide it with a URL, say, a Twitter profile, and from there it follows hyperlinks that contain rel="me" to other pages owned by the same person.

For the second project, I’m using Prem’s Pablo library to create an SVG drawing webapp for both touch devices and regular desktop browsers. There’s a wide scope for this project so I’m quite excited about it; one idea was floated about using Node.js and Socket.IO to create a collaborative drawing app, which I think sounds awesome. The project has also been a great opportunity for me to get my head around the challenges of targeting a variety of different devices, along with all of the specific JavaScript and CSS that comes with that, together with a good way of architecting it all into something that’s usable and makes sense.

Basically I’m being paid to have fun – a fairly surreal experience as I was pretty sure that when you called something work it was meant to suck; apparently this is yet another instance of TV lying to me.

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