daychilde

Inspired by this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677218 - "Creating an internship program", I thought I'd ask for your advice on how to prepare for an internship or entry-level position for the types of companies represented here on HN. In my specific case:

I've been a computer enthusiast since 1987; on the internet since 1994; creating and hosting websites since 1997; with my own dedicated servers since 2004. I've been programming in PHP since 2004 (not full-time) and Python since spring 2009. I'm about to man up and learn Javascript after putting it off too long. I'm competent in HTML and CSS; I do alright in Photoshop.

I interned last year with the US Forest Service, writing a Python front end to a framework also written in Python; and worked on a couple of web applets in PHP (with JS that I did modify a little) that displayed smoke and weather data.

I'm working towards getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, but it's slow going.

If you were looking for entry level or interns, what would you want to see from me? What skills are you looking for? What kind of project might I show you that would get me in the door so I could contribute (i.e. make myself useful) and learn (i.e. make myself more useful)?

While I'm here, I might as well add: For the record, I am looking for an entry level position or internship. Seattle would be a plus if there's a chance for a permanent position, but I'd move anywhere for the right job. Certainly anywhere for a good internship.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

I'd like to know if you think this would be worth it (i.e. have business potential); if you might use something like this; if something like this already exists and works (and I just don't happen to know about it). I may well write this anyway, as I was initially thinking, for my own benefit anyway; but I'm open to advice on working this towards perhaps my own company...

So here's the idea:

Right now, when I make a website, I'vdde gotten to the point of setting up template pages (shared headers and navigation and other features) with an area for that particular page's content.

My latest experiment, which really works well for small sites, is to stick everything in a single php file and redirect 404 to it and let it figure out what path the visitor wanted and go there (i.e. it detects that you tried to access /aboutus/ and returns the proper page, built from the various parts). Even CSS is called this way, and I properly output the css file to the browser via php...

So I'm thinking of trying to automate this a little bit:

1. Store page contents in a database - but I'd be storing html, with a text interface to work on the files, not a GUI.

2. Have a page navigation structure with automatically generated navigation menus.

3. Allow for multiple page templates

4. Allow for multiple widgets/plugins that I'm currently thinking would be how a template is made. So this could be things like a list of the most recently updated pages to a calendar of events, or... I'm not totally sure yet.

5. Have page/widget/not sure what other level of variables - like for pages, an associated "page title" variable that the page header widget would look for and use somewhere in the graphical header area of the rendered page, as well as put in the html 'head' section so it appears in the browser's titlebar...

I suppose I want to be a little inspired by Wordpress and its concept of pages (as opposed to posts) and its widgets and customizeable sidebar; but try to make it easier to write useful plugins, and make the page templates themselves a part of what's stored in the database.

Does this make sense so far? Am I giving too much info or not enough? And what do you think?