Week One Of My WordPress Internship…

So many posts! Where to start!? The sheer amount of unanswered posts in the Support forums was a bit daunting at first. My first week as a WordPress Support intern was all about getting myself accustomed to the forums:

On my first day, I spent three and a half hours racking my brain and creating all manner of complex JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. to eventually solve an error in a user’s jQuery. It turned out that it was a very simple fix (the user was calling the wrong selector) – it shouldn’t have taken me nearly as long as it did to spot this.

I fell into this trap of spending too long on one problem several times throughout the week. I’ve soon realised not to leave it so long before reaching out for help or moving on from a post.

At the end of my first week, I feel as though I am a little quicker at spotting bugs in other people’s code and better at identifying the forum posts that I’m able to answer.

Week two: I’m going to continue with forum support and will also be contributing to the Codex.  Any advice/tips would be much appreciated. 🙂

P.S: I missed the weekly IRC Support chat on Thursday (sorry!) but will make sure I’m at the next one. Look forward to speaking with some of you then.

#forums, #gnome, #internship, #opw, #support

Support Internship: Introduction

Hey everyone.

I’m Siobhan. I’ll be interning at WordPress this summer as part of the Gnome OPW. My internship will be centred around support (forums, training, documentation) and my mentors are Mika Epstein and Hanni Ross, with Jen Mylo and Andrea Middleton acting as program administrators.

A little about me: I’m from Barry, South Wales and studied Computer Science at the University of Reading. Last year, I was lucky enough to spend a few months working as a developer at a digital agency in Florence, Italy – it was here that I started learning more about and getting involved in Free and Open-Source Software. I have since gone on to work on various WordPress projects on a freelance basis.

I feel very lucky to have this opportunity to get involved with and give back to the WordPress community.

I’ll be posting updates on my internship here every Monday for the next three months, and you’ll also be able to find me lingering on the #wordpress, #wordpress-sfd, and #wordpress-gsoc IRC channels.

As a final note: I’d like to wish the other seven WordPress GSoC/Gnome OPW interns a great summer. Good luck everyone!

#gnome, #internship, #opw, #support

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

Hi support team. I would like to include Support in our Gnome participation this summer if there are any applicants interested in working in the forums etc over the summer. @ipstenu and/or other experienced team members: Head over to https://codex.wordpress.org/Gnome_Summer_Program_for_Women#Support and fill in project ideas (optional, I made a default idea that basically covers answering questions and beefing up support docs) and info on whoever from this team is willing/able to mentor an intern (ideally we put more than one mentor with each student so the time commitment isn’t too heavy). No idea yet how many student slots we’ll get.

#gnome