Topix Weblog

August 29, 2006

Ode to an Intern

by at 5:10 PM

It ain't easy being an engineering intern. One minute, you're at school, standing in the quad on a beautiful sunny day, throwing the frisbee and quaffing a cold one, and the next... you're in a fluorescent-lit jungle of cubicles with a warm diet Coke in one hand, and cold, ergonomic mouse in the other. You've got only a couple of weeks to figure out how things work, and everyone expects you to do things that your prof didn't cover in CS 399. On top of all that, you've got to figure out how to work with all types of characters that remind you of the freaky physics teacher you had in high-school. The months go by in a flash, and then suddenly it's time to go back to school. And that's when you realize that this is what the real world is going to be like when you graduate. Unless, of course, you're an intern at Topix. Because we have a hotdog machine.

And nowhere in the real world has free hot dogs.

Nowhere.

Anyhow, this summer we decided to hire our first intern. It all started several months ago while we were looking for engineers to join the crew. We put a lot of miles on the Topix company ride, hitting the job fairs both near and far.

And then we got lucky -- We found an awesome intern. Not only was she was able to come up to speed, learn all kinds of new things, and ship her first product/feature to millions of Topix users world-wide -- she was also really cool! She's the brains behind the "Did you mean" spelling feature in our spankin' new search results. So if ur 1 ov thos peeps who cant spel then this feeture is 4 U. We think its great... especially since our site-stats indicate that most of you spell as poorly as some of us do.

Who is this fantastic intern? We're almost afraid to mention her name for fear that someone will steal her from us and she won't come back next year. But, we do want to give her credit for everything she's done, so we'll just have to take that chance. Her name is Dafna.

There we've said it.

Hopefully she'll want to come back and join us again next year, and maybe bring along a few friends as well. We'd be lucky and honored to have her.

Thanks Dafna. Good luck in your junior year! And if you need help with your homework (unlikely), you have all of our home phone numbers. :-)