I interned at FAQQLY (a social networking startup) over summer 2006, originally to work on the interface, but would often work on the backend as well. (Small teams means everyone gets to touch almost everything.)

Over the course of the summer I worked on everything from drawing out prototypes on whiteboards with other interns to design the flow of pages, to writing new features and pushing to the server (and fixing it when it broke! no budget for a real IT guy…)

The most notable accomplishment was designing front to back the entire Shares section of the page. Users would post items they were willing to share, and their friends could request to borrow them. For business reasons we had to launch that feature by a certain date, so I volunteered to write it in a week so the other employees could concentrate on developing other parts of the site. After talking with the founder to understand what he was expecting, I sat down with a few other interns and drew out how I expected pages to be laid out on a whiteboard, as well as sketching on paper so they could comment on specific aspects of the page flow. Papers in hand I began coding, and finished everything in about 4 working days. The end product featured Amazon integration (to grab data and pictures of items), AJAX image upload, and everything a Web 2.0 site needs to call itself 2.0.

The founder also wanted to push content sharing (for network effects and positive blogger buzz). I researched potential API “styles” (REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, etc), and eventually settled on a REST API for simplicity. I wrote all of the code for it, and then handed off a description of the API to the project leader so we could publish a spec for users. I also implemented things such as RSS and Atom feeds and microformats to further the good internet citizen vibe.

It was quite a wild ride.