Our Intern, Eliza Wells, Discusses Her Broadcast Feature Improvement

Hi! I’m Eliza, a summer intern here at EventBoard. Soon I’ll be starting classes at Stanford, where I hope to study computer science and philosophy. This summer, I had the opportunity to be a part of EventBoard’s development team.

Let me tell you about the project I’ve been working on for the last little while. It’s an image upload gallery to make the Broadcasts feature even easier to use – and nicer to look at.

Broadcast Image Gallery

The new gallery will save your previously uploaded images, so that you can reuse them over and over. (Eventually it will also include an additional gallery of stock images, so that you don’t need to upload anything at all.)

When I began this project, I had no idea where to start. Now, I’m rewriting the feature in another programming language (from the Django framework to Ember.js) to enhance its capabilities even more.

As simple as (I hope) this feature looks, making it work involved solving multiple puzzles. It’s easy to see that something has gone wrong, but it’s hard to see why – and even harder to figure out what needs to be done to fix it.

In order to integrate this feature into the rest of the platform, I had to find formatting options that would make the gallery visually appealing. I also had to learn how to save images so that the right ones would show up at the right time. (At one point, a disastrous line of code turned every image on the page into the same picture of an umbrella.)

It was also an exercise in confidence, building off of what others have done before without being afraid to add my own improvements – and without being afraid to delete everything I’d written and try again.

My Time at EventBoard

I have loved my time at EventBoard. The slogan here is “work shouldn’t suck,” and it really doesn’t. Everyone makes jokes and meets deadlines, and the company ping-pong table gets daily use.

Every day, I am surrounded by people with varied interests and talents, all of whom have been incredibly willing to answer my questions and give me life advice.

In my time here, I’ve learned how to work with frameworks like Django and Ember.js. I’ve almost mastered how to dig through about 10,000 files to find the one line of code I want to change. I’ve also learned to value process and consistency, to fix my mistakes rather than just working around them, and to never leave leftover sushi at the table.

As I go out into The Real World, I’ll take with me valuable nuggets such as “Know what ‘done’ means before you start” and “Always, always, always use the internet.” But I’ll also take with me the exhilaration of knowing that something I wrote is live on the web, improving users’ interactions with a fantastic product.

Enjoy!