Another week passed

Indeed it has been a week since I’ve posted last, although it doesn’t seem near that long. Time really does fly when you work 10-13 hours days, whowouldathunk? Although, if I didn’t like it, I can’t imagine that I would be doing it still. I know I’ve said it before and I’ll say it time and time again, but this place is just wonderful to work at. Over the past week, we’ve accomplished more than it would take months to accomplish at jobs I’ve had before.
 

Since I arrived here, we’ve been working on a sweet project that I really wasn’t able to say anything about. But now that it has gone live, I can talk about it all I want, after all, the rest of the world is! I won’t, however, be able to detail this story as well as it deserves since I’ve only been in on the last leg of the project, so for more information, head on over to Rob Curley’s blog, or go check out the real story here.

To both bring you up to speed on what this all entailed and to sorta summarize Rob’s blog a bit (as it is pretty long), let me divulge a few details. When I arrived here at the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive on the 23rd, I quickly jumped right into helping out with what I could on this project. The data had already been collected and and the design had already begun. It was down to organizing all the data (and cleaning it up a bit) and Jesse (our amazing flash guy) was continuing work on the interactive map. After my first day of getting comfortable with the office, people, coffee machine, etc, I dove in to some work.

They had all this data strung out in various spreadsheets which needed parsed through and organized into one big file (called an XML file) to be used in Jesse’s flash map. Jesse had mentioned a few ideas on how to do this, but he didn’t have the time to sit down and massage the data, so this is where I volunteered. I said that I could probably write a little Python script to do that in a couple hours. So I put on my headphones and coded away. That night I had my first version of the converter script written and it worked as it was supposed to. Then, like with any project, guidelines changed and I had to rewrite the script a few times and tweak it around here and there according to what people needed before I could call it good. My script worked like a charm and I was proud to have contributed something during my first couple days of joining the team.

Now enough of the technical mumbo jumbo… on to something that you can see.

This past Monday morning was the day that this entire project went live. It was the center of attention in many locations.

The front page of The Washington Post had this section:

The business section also had the full front page dedicated to this story:

Three additional pages of print:

(My name is somewhere in that right column of really small text above )

And finally the centerpiece of it all — a gorgeous double-truck in the middle of the business section:

(Images all courtesy of Rob Curley and his lengthy blog)

Being able to open up The Washington Post and see all this stuff that I watched coming together and being created was just a sensational feeling. I know to those in “the biz”, it’s just another day on the job, but I’m just some kid that decided one day to be a programmer and somehow ended up in DC spending my days at WPNI. So I’m going to be excited about it.

On a slightly different note, I went to a couple Smithsonians this past weekend, but those pretty much pale in comparison to what I get to do at work! Maybe I’ll talk about those another day. I’m going to call it a night here. I’ll try not to let another week go by before I blog again, but life has been crazy around here with work and living in random places until I get into an apartment (which is happening this weekend, woo!)

Cheers!

Sean Stoops

PS – I want to reiterate, if you enjoy reading a blog, then please comment on it! It’s the only way the authors know you enjoy it! Now head on over to Shanna’s blog about her Europe travels; I think she’s going to post a lot more than me. Oh yeah.. she’s a friend from ESU doing a summer blog like I am.