First Day On The Job April 29, 2013
Early Traffic
Jenna and I spent the last week unpacking our stuff and getting settled into our new apartment. So today I woke up extra early, because I had no idea what traffic would be like on my way to Salt Lake City. Orientation started at 8:30 in the morning, so I left Orem at 6. Traffic was non-existent and I made it to Salt Lake by 7, and parked my car underneath the Conference Center. I then walked to the Church Office Building and asked the security guard where I should wait until the doors opened at 8:30 at the Human Resource department.
Orientation
There were over 25 of us scheduled for the orientation meeting this morning. I guess everybody wanted to start their internships before May 1st. There are three of us interning at FamilySearch in Orem for the frontend development group. And there were some issues with some of the other’s paperwork. The man at the front desk said that not all the right emails were sent last week. I was able to get through easily enough and I received a security badge for the Church Office Building. After all the paperwork was taken care of, we had a group meeting where we walked through all of the paperwork that we needed to fill out to make sure we are legal and financially set up.
Back in Orem
Orientation didn’t take very long and by 11, we were all headed back to Orem to become acquainted with the frontend development group. All of us interns were given the whirlwind tour of the facilities as we met with several of the teams who work on the first floor of ‘Building S’. We were then treated to lunch at Costa Vida and then we came back to get our workstations all set up. FamilySearch is letting each of us use a 27” Cinema Display screen with a MacBook Pro. I know that everyone (especially Clay) in the I-Learn Developers Group wished they had this kind of set up. After we were mostly set up, we were finished for the day. We didn’t all have our teams figured out, so we’ll find out more tomorrow.
What I learned
- Traffic doesn’t have to be so bad as long as you plan ahead for it
- Family history is taken very seriously by the church
- FamilySearch uses an AGILE development cycle
What I still need to learn
- FamilySearch’s software stack called Frontier
- Everyone’s names
What I wish I had already learned
- Markdown as a markup language, because I am writing these blog posts with markdown
- More practice with node.js because FamilySearch relies heavily on node