For the past four months I have been working at Raincity Studios as a co-op student and thought it might be nice to try and sum up my experience. So what did I learn? Well, a couple things struck me in the first week that I still find impressive.
The importance of including community in your projects isn't normally covered in class and so far my schooling has had a focus on siloed programming and development. Raincity really stressed community involvement and some of my tasks in the first week were drafting a blog post, introducing myself to relevant Drupal groups, digging into the code, and filing issues for small improvements, with the overall goal of letting others know what we would be working on. Building momentum on your work is a great way to keep yourself going and often people are even willing to help out. Being able to build on an existing project like the SMS Framework module by Development Seed really helped get our work off the ground and now that I see my code and ideas being picked apart by other community members, it's nice to know that others can continue to improve on our contributions.
Raincity Studios also seems to have good mix of diversity within the company. Often companies focus strictly on either developing or designing, but I feel lucky to have learned a lot while talking with the designers in the office. From a developer's perspective, I think that having people around that can abstract you away from code goes a long way toward better programming, design, and, in the end, products. Additionally, having counterparts in Shanghai and around the globe really broadens your perspective — some of the discussions in our Skype channel and on our public blog really helped bring up issues I wouldn't normally be faced with.
There are many smaller things I picked up that I probably couldn't list. I really valued this work term and I think the experience has really helped to shape my views on development, design, and the world. Thanks for the great summer to everyone at Raincity, and I hope to see you in the fall!