Worked on Immigration History UI! The Lesson Plan section of the page needed some redesigning.

Here was my first solution based off of Jac’s original design. I used the information currently populating the Overview of Major Laws page for this. I separated each section into its own box.

Later I found out that not all the Lesson Plans have the same structure or content, so it’d be hard to divide up into sections, so I created some designs that could keep everything in one box.

I’ve also been working on more Russian illustrations.

Illustration edit! Added a snow woman with a “skirt”

And the new RUS407 banner.

And planning!

Beginning the Canvas Appstore Project

Project: Canvas Appstore
Completion status: Started October 19 2018
Staff guidance: Chris Pittman
STA team members: Jac
Description/plans: Download a server & start running some code! Also meet with Jac about UI design.
To be completed: Not really sure to be honest 

After my orientation I immediately jumped into my first project. It turns out that UT is trying to build an Appstore for different Canvas add-ons! It looks as if I’ll be using the design elements that Jac has created to code into CSS.

So, to begin, I met with Chris and got the lay of the land on Git. Later, I started to install MAMPS which is the server that I’ll be using for this project. I ran into some issues when confirming that I could run my files on this server, so I reached out to Chris and hopefully I can get that sorted out for Monday. I also met with Jac today and she gave me some great notes on how to code the CSS for this project so that’s super exciting!

I also took a tour of the LAITS Studio and took my photo for the STA poster!

New Self Portrait

This is the new self portrait for the STA banner I designed with Chloe’s help and youtube.

My Summer at Amazon

I had the opportunity to work for Amazon this summer in Seattle and it was probably one of the most intense summer’s I have ever had. As someone who has not lived outside of Texas since the age of 5 it was a very dramatic shift in scenery and culture that I had not expected. To start with all the food was delicious. There are so many more varieties of food and the food truck scene is even bigger than in Austin! The only thing that was bad was the “mexican” food. Also the nature was incredible! I now see how people can go on hikes in the summer because the weather is actually perfect (besides the first 2 weeks I was there when it rained the entire time, which was a nice welcome to Seattle).  In Texas you’d probably die if you went on a long hike in the middle of the day during Summer. Here’s a picture of a hike called Rattlesnake Ridge:

and another hike we did called Twin Falls:

In terms of my actual internship I worked on the backend for the Customer Service team at Amazon. At Amazon they have small (6-8 people) teams for just about every operation within Amazon. My team specifically handled customer service surveys. My intern project was to write code to automatically send/not send surveys based on certain criteria. For example if the customer service call was disconnected you do not send a survey. To accomplish this I had to design a brand new back-end API using Java which returned a true of false after doing a series of checks within different Amazon systems. The culture at Amazon is to basically let someone at a project with little to no help and see if they survive/ask for help themselves. This was especially stressful because I had no idea this was the case. I thought I was just being ignored at first but it turns out people were waiting for me to reach out. Towards the end of the project I was messaging people who I previously thought were just some high up people that I could never talk to. I learned that there is also a lot of bureaucracy that goes on in big companies. In school I’m used to diving head first into a project without much thought, yet at these companies literally everything you do has to be approved by ~1 million people. It sucks but I can see why it’s necessary so you don’t mess up anything big! In fact during my time there the entire website crashed once and there was mass pandemonium.

Overall, the experience was enlightening but it definitely was not my the job I was looking for. I think that the culture at Amazon fits a certain type of person, which I am not. Seattle itself was amazing, and I highly recommend visiting if you have not!

Emily Park ~ STA Orientation 2018 Fall!