Final Day of Placement

As I was leaving placement today, i thought the best way to go was to buy some presents for people or basically things for them to eat during the day.

So i bought some pies, some cakes and also stuck a fish behind the fridge. Not Really.

But overall I have really enjoyed this placement and really really like the attitude of the company. Reading on their website, it states that they are working for blue chip companies. To be able to do this, the quality of work has to be exceptional, and it is. From the design work done by the designers on the high chairs to the eventual coding done by the devs in the hottest room in the building, the standard of work is high.

A company like this deserves all the success they can get, especially as its original founders are still here and are the backbone of this company.

Anywho, this is the last day i get to sit in the office drinking tea and doing some work.

Good Day

PLACEMENTISING – FINAL WEEK

Holy Egg McMuffin, my time on my placement is nearly over. A whole 6 weeks have gone by without me actually realising it. Well I have realised it as my body has severley suffered from sleep deprivation. I look like the following picture right now.

Me on the bus on way to work

However, what I have learnt over the past 6 weeks has been pheonmenal. Not just what I have learnt whilst coding AS3, which is something I have spoken a lot about on this blog, but what I have learnt about how an agency is run by the people who created it.

Everyone in here is really positive about the work they are doing, bar a few moans and groans that you get along the way but that is the same with every workplace you go to and will remain that way until everything is done digitally. i.e. from home.

The people I have worked with have been really supportive of me including in the first week where i was crap. I can;t put it any bluntly but i was strugglying to create HTML newsletters. I know it was because I was nervous and was trying to make a good first impression, but constantly sending emails back to Hayley (who was passing me the work) didn’t do much for my reputation or valuation in the company.

I have learnt from those around me even if they don’t know on how to crack problems and their various ways into relaxing and solving problems. Some like to eat biscuits whilst trying to crack complex PHP puzzles whilst others approach problems from a more systematic angle. It has shown me that there are many way sto get to the solution it just depends on which way is your way.

There are a few people I want to mention as they are the ones who got me this placement and were also so very lenient as they realized that i had a full time job on top of this. To Richard who put up with me turning up late or sometimes not all due to illness, injury or trying to do the worm and failing. Everyone in the office who I have worked with, mainly Hayley, Charles, Rachel and chicken Dan, even though I haven’t been that talkative, due to unprecedented shyness  ,it has been fun working with and around you lot.

When i return to Uni, I will return with more confidence and experience in the Actionscript and in the quality of work that is up to professional standard. The placement has shown me how high the standard of work is in the competitive market with creative ideas being the difference between making it or failing.

Placement Day One & Two

Refreshed Logo

So after weeks of delays due to moving and other things, my placement finally began yesterday [14/7/08] at Refreshed Media with an explosion of me panicking about what i know and what i don’t know. Not the best way to start a professional placement at a well established media firm, but anyway what hurts you can only make you stronger.

The first thing that i had to do was create an emailer, a sort of advertisement that gets sent through to your inbox, like spam, but better. After a rocky start with me thinking that i had to completely redo an advert, i realised that all i had to do was crate a html page that included none of that css dazzle that I had been told I would need to learn. Email clients do not like CSS, they do not, so usually change how the advert looks when it goes into the mailbox. So, to reduce file size, a nicely made leaflet, created by designers, had to be cut down and torn apart and then pieced back together into HTML. Using tables. OOOo Tables, contraversial.

Between leaving and coming back, 16 hours passed and so far today as in Tuesday, I have been doing simple emailers that involve basic changing of text so that the adverts relate to a different advertising category.

Since I arrived like yesterday, my colleagues have been really helpful and aided me in everything i needed to do including making coffee. I am really enjoying the experience so far and i know that throughout the six weeks I will be dealt some curveballs that I will have to overcome in the programming ballpark. (I do really like metaphors)