A Day in the Life at Tagged (Intern-style!)
My Tagged Story
As an intern on the Mobile Web team, I helped develop and launch Tagged’s first BlackBerry app. My typical work day involves creating features and products for Tagged’s mobile division – and I’m also sure to set aside some time during and after work to battle my co-workers in Starcraft, chess or whatever new board game someone brought in.
At Tagged, every intern is assigned a mentor who provides projects and ongoing career guidance. The large pool of talented mentors is a critical part of the internship program’s success. The quality of my internship has been substantially increased by my mentor, Mark Kater, who gives me the right balance of direction and freedom to help me excel at my work. Being new to the company and new to mobile development – and being shy by nature – having a mentor by my side has been immensely helpful in my growth and development. Beyond my immediate mentor, everyone at Tagged is hugely helpful and friendly – it’s as if those qualities are required to work at the company!
Working on Mobile
My work on the Tagged BlackBerry app was definitely one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on at Tagged. From research to development to deployment, my favorite part of this process researching and experimenting with different app solutions. One big surprise for me was how many steps it took to actually set up and deploy the app on BlackBerry. Deploying the app required an array of resources, including legal documentation and icons.
As part of the Mobile team, many of my tasks have been about porting features from Desktop Web to Mobile Web (e.g., user registration, status updates, etc.) or fixing bugs that involve varying amounts of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Tagged’s Mobile Web is being developed with a progressive enhancement strategy in order to ensure support for lower-end devices so we haven’t gotten around to introducing JavaScript yet. This means that porting over a feature from Desktop Web usually involves thinking about how it can be adapted to function in an environment without AJAX, lightbox overlays or any other similar luxuries that we may be accustomed to. Despite the fact that our Mobile site has a limited feature set compared to our Desktop Web version, mobile daily page views have soared to nearly 15 million.
Interns are also tasked with giving an end-of-term presentation to the entire company about a topic of their choosing. Presentation topics cover a wide spectrum, including math, technology and culture. The presentations provide a great opportunity for interns to showcase their interests and talents to the broader team.
Every day I’m excited to come into Tagged and work with my teammates to launch new features on Mobile Web. You know you’re at a great place when it doesn’t even feel like work!
Allen Dam is an intern on the Mobile Team at Tagged and you can follow him on Twitter.
