Blog / Culture

Roughly six weeks ago or so, I arrived at Skookum Digital Works as its first-ever participant in the Official Internship Program. (There have been other interns before me, but they flew ad-hoc routes.)

As a former robotics engineer, my love of code was high, but my actual knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript/allThingsWeb was rather low. Fortunately, the good folks at Skookum saw my potential and gave me a shot at pursuing my new-found passion, web development!

There are six major components to the Skookum Internship Program:

1. Projects
   1. Internal
      • On this project, I didn’t have to answer to any clients; instead, I worked with Josh, our Creative Director, to build something AWESOME. (And learn some skills on my own.)
      • Sometimes these projects are academic in nature, but they’re all good opportunities to get some good learning in.
   2. Client-focused
      • These real, client-based projects, are what make Skookum tick. Clients want the best product they can get for their hard-earned money, and I got to help make them happen.
2. Location
   1. Working at Trade & Tryon in Uptown Charlotte is pretty sweet.
   2. With a real office, too.
      • I didn’t get stuck in a closet away from all the cool kids; I actually worked right alongside the rest of the Skookum team. I worked on the same teams looked at the same code and ate the same lunch as everyone else.
3. Compensation
   1. Skookum’s Internship program is a paid position—how often does that happen in other industries?
4. Hours
   1. Just like the big kids, I got to work normal hours. In the web dev world, that’s not necessarily 9-5, which is awesome. But it’s full-time, not part-time, which means 40 hours/week of intense learning.
5. Mentors
   1. Every member of the Skookum team was accessible to me. I think the original point of the mentors was to have one mentor per intern, but I’m pretty non-traditional and I made everyone my mentor. For me, asking everyone for help was a good way to get to know the team and learn as much as I possibly could. Skookumites come in a wide variety of flavors: we’ve got Ruby pros, sick PHP devs, Node.js champions, and jQuery gurus, to name a few. To not take advantage of the diversity would be a huge mistake.
6. End-game
   1. The goal of the program is to transition interns into full-on (junior) developers. In some ways, it’s like the longest interview ever. But it’s also an amazing opportunity to get into the web development game, with a pretty low amount of risk for everyone.
   2. I’ll be honest—I wasn’t entirely sure that web development would be the right career for me when I started; it turns out I’ve been a closet web developer my whole life! The Skookum Internship program helped me find that out.
   3. It’s with that notion that I’m thrilled and honored now to be Skookum’s latest Junior Developer, hot off the presses.

All said and done, being an intern was crazy fun—I got to work with some really smart folks in hands-down the most relaxed and productive environment I’ve ever known. I’m shipping real code and making a real contribution to the team. Huzzah!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to building a better Internet.

While attending NodeSummit in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, I was approached by very sweet older lady named Gretchen. She was strolling through the exhibition area for unrelated reasons and stopped in her tracks when she saw the word “Skookum” on our banner. Gretchen is a retired school teacher from the Pacific Northwest, and she told me a story about the “Skookums” that her students loved to hear and that she had told for many years.

At the beginning of the world, people had no fire. The only fire anywhere was on top of a high mountain, guarded by the Skookums. You see, these Skookums were not like the fine and friendly Skookums we have today, these Skookums were total hoarders. They didn’t want the people to have fire, because if they did, then maybe they would become as powerful as the Skookums.

A coyote thought he’d be sly and go steal a brand of fire and bring it to the people. After consulting his three sisters for advice, (in an odd twist of events, the three sisters lived in the coyote’s stomach in the form of huckleberries…but I digress), the coyote lined up all the animals in strategic places along the mountainside in a line between the Skookum’s fire and the people.

The coyote stole some fire while the Skookum’s were chillaxing, then the animals basically relayed raced the fire until eventually an antelope gave the fire to a frog, who swallowed it. The frog then spat out the fire onto a piece of wood. The Skookum’s—kinda mad at this point—couldn’t figure out how undo the frog-fire-wood-spit, so they went back to the top of the mountain, presumably to resume chillaxing. The coyote then showed the people how to get the fire out of the wood by rubbing sticks together—and that’s why you can eat and be warm now.

So, why did I tell you this story? Because today’s Skookums aren’t hoarders. We don’t want to withhold our technology expertise, our “fire” if you will, from the people.

We don’t want coyotes up in our business either. So trust me, we’ll give you the fire. Just ask. Or come to a Friday Tech Talk.

*Illustrations by Rich!