Work Update

So back to work tomorrow. Last week got pretty stressful, I'm still learning what a huge process it is to create an application. We are finally moving to the development stage, so far its been all planning. We kept coming up with ideas, then figuring out how difficult they were, or deciding they weren't useful enough. It was so hard to find something that people would use, and that would benefit the company, but that we could finish in 8 weeks we have. We started with an idea for a gadget that would tell the users if they were able to send and receive email. This idea was useful to the company in that it would lower support calls by letting a user know if they had connectivity problems, and therefore save money, but it became an issue of how exactly do you test whether someone can send and receive email. There are innumerable paths for a email to get to someone's mailbox, so actually checking that an email you sent out was received is impossible. We could check that the connection between a users personal mailbox and the hub that actually transports the email was in tact, but wouldn't guarantee the user was able to receive email because a connection could be out elsewhere. There were also issues of what email service someone is using. Exchange works with on premise servers, and off premise servers (the server is actually on Microsoft campus) as well as other clients like Imap accounts, and  Smart phones . So this idea is proving to be very difficult, and though we haven't canceled it out, we are trying to implement a new idea. We have, however, begun programming a dummy gadget. We split the project into features, and I (along with one other girl) will own the log-in feature. We will be responsible for creating a log in page that will take a ID, find the credentials that correspond with that ID (located on the server), verify the credentials and then display the information the gadget uses from the server. I'm really excited about it. We have already made progress and its so cool to figure something new out and see it actually work. This week will be mostly coding and we hope to have that feature completed by the end of the week! I'm so glad we finally have something to show for our work. We are still deciding on the other 2 features, so we will have to work on that this week as well.

The weekend was good. We went to the beach with a bunch of friends on Saturday evening. We had planned to have a bonfire on the beach but all the fire pits were taken so we just hung out for awhile then went to a friends and bar-b-qued. a lot of the interns were they, so it was lots of fun. Today one of my roommates and our friend went to a few waterfront parks, then went walking around a small town called kirkland. Then we went over to a friends and bar-b-qued again. It was such nice weather, so it was good to spend some time outdoors.