BrightMix - Blog

Focus on the User

2008-07-10T05:19:00Z

I frequently comb through our archives of documents on Google Docs, and recently stumbled upon this mind-dump that I did about two years ago. It’s describing a product idea that I had for a web app, and how it could be made SO MUCH better than the existing sites out there.

It’s not about the technology - its about experience.

Funny thing is, here we are two years later, and we’re finally building the product... Interestingly, this is still exactly the vision and direction that we’re taking things. I encourage you to do the same… Though this was initially for our webapp, I truly believe that this stuff transfers. Reader’s Digest version:

Be 100 percent about the user. Provide value. Be awesome.

Happy users = returning users = more traffic
Happy users tell their friends
Happy users don’t get frustrated, and spend more time on site
How to make happy user?
- Site easy on the eyes
  - No BLINKING ADS!
- Don’t FORCE ADS DOWN THEIR THROATS
  - Google taught us that RELEVANT, unobtrusive ads can be VERY PROFITABLE
  - Annoying ads are not good for the advertiser OR the user
- Actually RELEVANT, USEFUL CONTENT will drive the MOST TRAFFIC
  - Make a site that people actually WANT TO USE
- Provide them with the information that they WANT
  - Provide value, and the people will come
  - Provide value, and the people will tell other people.
- Provide them with USEFUL INFORMATION
  - Don’t just put information “just because”
  - Give serious thought to providing VALUE to the user in every area of the site.
    - Why is the user visiting the ??? section? Am I solving his/her needs?
- Make it EASY
  - On the internet, it’s EASY for a user to go somewhere else.
  - Make the site EASY TO USE, or they will leave, and go to a competitor whose site IS easy to use
    - Don’t assume that they will stay because of your BRAND, or because of your MONOPOLY.

Work from home Monday

2008-07-01T03:59:00Z

This past Friday, Omaha was hit by a rather sizable storm, complete with 90+ MPH winds, sideways hail, and all that fun stuff. Most of Midtown Omaha (the area around the BrightMix office) was hit pretty hard. As an example, the picture to the right was taken by a good friend of ours, Dave from SecretPenguin. His backyard was hit pretty hard, but thank goodness nobody was hurt!

However, the storm did initially knock power out for 100,000+ people. As of this morning, there were aparently still 20k+ peeps without power, including yours truly, BrightMix. As a result, today we had the first official work-from-home Monday! Here I thought I would outline some of the tools of the trade, that make it possible for us to work nearly as (if not more!) productively as a remote (and powerless) team…

What works?

MacBook Pros! – Ah yes, the official computer product of BrightMix. We recently purchased a shiny new MBP for Erin #1, bringing our total to 7, or 1 per person. This makes it trivial for people to work from home, a coffee shop or a beach. Doesn’t matter, the work can get done!

Campfire – Our chat program of choice. Its great because you can leave the room, and come back and get caught up on everything that has happened up to that point. As a disconnected team, we’re able to use it to keep track of what everyone else has going on. We love it, even though it is a bit of a cesspool lately :-)

Hosted SVN – Thank goodness for not hosting our SVN at our office (which, remember, has no power). We currently use Dreamhost for this, because the setup is dead simple, and its rock solid. Not exactly performant, but rock solid.

Freshbooks – Web-based time tracking software, allows us to continue to be billable during the outage. Also since its the last day of the month, it allows me to do invoicing!

What doesn’t work?

Even though we have a lot of great things in place to handle such an outage, there are several things that break down for us…

SQL Server – We do a good deal of ASP.NET development, and we don’t each run individual SQL databases, but rather connect to the BrightMix SQL Server. This is great normally, even remotely, when all you have to do is VPN in… no dice with no power though…

VPN Access – No power = no VPN. See above for why this is crappy

Quickbooks – I suppose I could run QB from my Mac, and then I’d be totally remote-capable, but I don’t want to buy it again. And, this normally wouldn’t bother me (who cares if I can’t enter receipts for a few days), but as I mentioned before, its the end of the month, and I want to send invoices :(

Refrigerator – Yes, we lost all the goodies we had in the fridge/freezer…. like chicken nugs. And popsicles.

All in all, it was a good an productive day! Good thing, because its looking like tomorrow will be official work-from-home Tuesday! Who knows, this might just stick!

Top 10 ways BrightMix is not like XYZ Corp

2008-06-18T14:03:00Z

Kevin and Dusty have written some interesting articles about running a small business. Now, it’s my turn to throw my 2 cents in about working for one…..Top 10 Style!

Adios Outlook Calendar!

I adore my freedom from the Outlook Calendar, and Outlook in general. That’s not to say that we don’t schedule anything at BrightMix, because we certainly schedule the important things, like dinner for Cinco de BrightMix or meetings with clients. We simply don’t schedule everything (10:37: Bathroom Break – I think not). If we need to discuss something, we generally do it when the issue comes up, not next week or next month.

No More PowerPoint!

In my experience in Corporate America, Power Point ruled the day. Nearly every meeting of any significance required a set of Power Point slides, with gold stars going to people who printed copies for all attendies. It’s as if they believed that Microsoft has found a way to inject pretty bullet-point lists of information into our memories. The truth of the matter is that most slide decks suck – their only purpose is to provide the presenter with his or her own talking points.

Here at BrightMix, white boards rule. If we need a more permanent record, Kevin takes a picture with his iPhone and we paste it into Campfire. High Five!

More Hats

One of the interesting things about working for a small business is the array of hats each of us wears. We don’t have people, let alone entire departments, dedicated to Payroll, HR, Benefits, Marketing, PR, or PC Support. Everyone just pitches in. I, for example, am not only a developer. I am also the acting social chair, sous chef, and the BrightMix union rep. I’ve even been known to do the dishes, make the coffee, and occasionally clean the toilets (Yuck!).

Flexibility

I have a lot more flexibility working for BrightMix than I ever did working for XYZ Corp. It’s really refreshing to be able to say “I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday” or “I’m meeting some former co-workers for lunch—I might be gone for an hour and a half” with out being made to feel like a slacker. I occasionally work from home for no other reason than I like it.

I do have a little bit of a trade off for this flexibility, in that I am also more flexible. My hours are far less rigid than they ever were at XYZ Corp. I generally leave for the day between 5:00 and 5:30, but if something needs to be done, it needs to be done.

More Fun

Our regular readers are well aware of our “organized fun”, in the form of scheduled company outtings (here’s a shameless plug for the upcoming bowling trip). We also enjoy regular foosball games (although we’re on a brief hiatus for the summer), and have been known to gather around monitors for entertainment provided by YouTube. I highly recommend the Peep Wars.

Better Policies

The greatest thing about the BrightMix policy document is its length. There can’t be more than 15 items, at least 4 of which deal with opening and closing the office. We have all of the basic stuff – vacation and sick days, rough hours of operation, etc. That’s about it. What we don’t have includes a policy for answering the phone, dress code (although there is an unwritten rule that you should wear clothing), or a document dictating what can and cannot be left on our desks.

It’s policy document written for adults, which is exactly what we are (well, some of the time anyway). Hooray!

Stronger Voice

I’ve never been shy about sharing my ideas and opinions, ask anyone who knows me. The great thing about working for BrightMix is that my ideas are actually heard. Well, most of them. No one seems to have heard my idea for company BMWs. Then again, maybe they have, but they want it to be a surprise.

A Shorter Ladder

Until we fired up the BrightMix Summer Internship, I owned the corporate ladder. I could literally go no higher or lower. The great thing about owning the ladder is that you don’t have to coordinate with or cut through layers of management to get things done. Executive decisions occur precisely one floor above me. Elevator going up?

No Office Politics

This is one aspect of corporate life that I don’t think I will ever miss. Enough said.

Recognition

I understand that I am paid a salary to provide the company with my time and effort, but I still love positive feedback and an occasional high five for going the extra mile. I was lucky enough in my corporate experience to have supervisors that made sure I received proper recognition when going above and beyond. A lot of my colleagues did not – their supervisors took all the credit, or didn’t say anything at all (Boo!).

At BrightMix, Dusty and Kevin are all about Thank Yous and High Fives, even when we’re just doing the job they pay us for.

Internship Outing - Bowling!

2008-06-17T03:29:00Z

Way back in January when we first announced the BrightMix Internship Program, one of the core principles for the Internship was that we wanted to have fun! In fact, fun outings is even a line item as one of the perks of the job: Planned company outings (bowling, golfing, etc.) Well, sufficed to say, everyone around BrightMix (especially the interns) have been working their tails off for the past month or so, and we feel it is definitely time to do a little bowling.

So, this Friday, June 20th @ 3pm .. the whole BrightMix crew (all 7 of us!) will be heading to the bowling alley for an afternoon of gutter balls! The location will likely be West Lanes Bowling Alley, at 72nd and Dodge.

We also would like to extend the invitation to any of our loyal blog subscribers! Yup, anyone is welcome to join us… We’ll pick up the bowling tab, and maybe a pitcher or two of beer :-) We’d just like to have a fun afternoon out at the alley, with all our friends and colleagues.

If you think you’ll make it, comment it up! We’d love to see you there! Also, follow @brightmix on Twitter for updates!

Lots of activity on the FP blog!

2008-05-30T22:02:00Z

The BrightMix blog has been quiet lately, mostly because we’ve been blogging away over at the Feisty Piranha Project Blog... Check it out for stories and accounts of life as a BrightMix intern. Rest assured, we’ll return to our regular scheduled blog posting here at BrightMix.com soon.

BrightMix 2008 Summer Internship Launched!

2008-05-15T01:52:00Z

Low and behold, our Summer Internship Program has started! We’re happy to welcome aboard Allyn, Robert, and Erin #2 (and arguably Andy, who started with us a few weeks prior).

We started day #1 at the ridiculously early time of 9 a.m. Allyn, Robert, and Erin #2 arrived and we chatted for a little bit about this and that. Without wasting too much time, we dived right into talking about the interns’ summer project – code named the “Feisty Piranha Project.”

What’s this Feisty Piranha all about?

We’ll be releasing more details about the project’s purpose, goal, and overall meaning soon, but for now, you can check out the Interns’ blog at FeistyPiranha.com.

Everyone get to Work!

By mid-afternoon, much was talked about and Dusty’s voice was pretty much gone, so everyone moved to their workstations to start hacking.

We set up our two programmer interns, Robert and Allyn, in our old conference room, which turns out to be a pretty sweet workspace.

Our two designers are in the main room with Dusty, Erin, and myself. Surprisingly, even with 7 people here in our 900 sq foot space, it’s not as crowded as we expected.

Some Photos…

First Meeting!

Andy / Erin #’2 Desks

Robert / Allyn’s Desks

Programmers’ Whiteboard!

Our Weeks of Preparation!

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy preparing for the arrival of our interns.

This involved a lot of planning about the project and how we’re going to run it, in addition to buying a bunch of awesome equipment.

Since we’re all about treating our developers/designers right, we purchased 4x new desks, chairs, MacBook Pro’s, 24” monitors, and various mice and keyboards, based on request.

We have no shortage of equipment around the office now. As an added benefit, we can just turn on our fleet of 24” monitors this winter instead of running the furnace ;-)

We had our hearts set on getting some fashionable new Ikea desks. However, the closest Ikea is in Minneapolis – not exactly a hop, skip, and a jump away. Fortunately, Erin #2 and her husband Johnny happened to be in Minneapolis.. at Ikea… at a very opportune time! Thanks for bringing us our new Ikea desks!

As it turns out, assembling the desks was a breeze, but the file cabinets… Well, the first one took at least 2 hours to put together, and the other ones are still, um, under construction.

Anyone out there want to come in and assemble these things?!

All in all, we felt the Interns’ first day went really well and was even marginally fun. As for what the interns thought? You’ll have to find out by checking out their blog at feistypiranha.com!

Open House Party - A Successful Good Time!

2008-05-07T03:17:00Z

Thanks to everyone who came out for our Open House Party bash. It was great seeing our family, friends, and business acquaintances all come together to celebrate our company. We hope everyone enjoyed the event.

More people turned out than we expected; at one point in the evening, there were about 50 people in our office!

By the end of the night, all of the beer and wine was consumed, as well the snack foods. (The Quesadillas only lasted a few hours.) All in all, we’ve branded the event a sweeping success!

We also had a sweet vinyl sign put up on our front window, compliments of Marlina. It seems as though we’re totally official now!

We spent most of that Friday preparing for the event: cooking, cleaning, moving stuff around, etc. Our thanks to Erin G., Erin H., Evan, Marlina (and Marlina’s sister who loaned us the Quesadilla maker), Shawna, and Jane for helping us out.

Now that we’ve got our open house party out of the way, we can move forward on having other fun and exciting parties. Such as the BrightMix summer slip-and-slide party and the BrightMix summer ice cream social!

Photo Time! See all Open House Party Photos!

Cinco de BrightMix

2008-05-05T03:57:00Z

Tommorrow is Cinco de Mayo, one of our favorite holidays here at BrightMix! (Its no secret that we really enjoy quesadillas!) Needless to say, we will be heading out for some fantastic Mexican food and margaritas.

Our current plan is for dinner at Guaca Maya, one of Omaha’s finest Mexican establishments. Anyone is welcome to join us! I’ll be posting exact times and place updates on Twitter, both for BrightMix and myself... Right now, its looking like 6pm-ish… more details to follow.

We've picked the Interns!

2008-04-11T03:52:00Z

I’m happy to announce, that after what seemed like an ETERNITY of resume sorting, phone interviewing, in-person interviewing, and deliberating… we have selected the official interns for our 2008 Internship program.

Thank you so much to all that applied… We were really overwhelmed by the response that we received. We had over 120 applicants from a dozen or so schools, all vying for 3 spots, and there were some very talented individuals for sure. I must say, I was truly amazed at the response that we got.

The internship officially starts May 14th. We’ll be setting up a separate blog where the interns will write about their experiences, so you’ll get to meet them at that point.

Welcome Erin (#2), Robert & Allyn!

Explaination of the picture: Coffee fetching… Interns.. Get it? Funny, because our internship is decidedly NOT a coffee fetching, paper shredding internship.

Anonymous Software Job Postings

2008-04-10T18:14:00Z

Take a look at the following list of jobs that were posted on the Omaha Careerlink website a while back…

Here you have six developer positions, all posted by the same recruiter – Aureus Group. (Not to pick on Aureus… they’re fine people… Its just the best screenshot I could get) Many of these positions have the salary listed right in the job title. At first glance, you’d think “Fantastic! I can skim the jobs and only apply for the ones that fall into the money category that I’m looking for! Hurray!”

Click through to those jobs though.. Notice anything similar with them? Here’s a listing of the companies that you’d be working for in these great jobs…

Leader in the online world
Industry Leader
Privately held Service Bureau
One of the largest financial services firm in the world

“Industry leader?”.. What the hell does that mean? As Joel so eloquently puts it..

For the job seeker, the problem is the same: when they look on giant job boards they see a bunch of undifferentiated jobs, often posted by clueless headhunters that provide all kinds of information you don’t need (“A leading provider of whatever”) and none of the information you do need (what’s the name of the company? Do they make nuclear bombs? Will they give me a private office and a big monitor? Free M&Ms? Are they sloppy hacks or quality hackers? Can I use Ruby on Rails?)

It seems to me, that the concept of skimming jobs based on pay is a backwards approach to job searching. Yes, if you’re using the apply-to-as-many-jobs-as-possible approach, just to see if you can get a bite, then that may be great for you. But the truly great developers, the one’s that we’re looking for, would rather approach it from another direction.

It’s pretty much unanimous from developers that they want to know what company that they’re going to…

April 25th - BrightMix Open House Party

2008-04-04T05:10:00Z

We’ve made promise after promise to friends, family, and business associates about having a fabled BrightMix Open House Party. After all, we’ve been in business for about 8 months now… it’s about time we celebrate the founding of BrightMix!

We’ve blocked of an entire Friday evening on which to hold the event. So, without further ado:

Our Open House will be on Friday, April 25th starting at 4:30PM

Feel free to stop by the office after work for some socializing, a drink or few, and some delicious snacks. We’ll be providing a keg of delicious beer and other drinks of both the alcoholic an non-alcoholic variety.

Similarly, we’re going to have some delicious finger food for people to snack on, probably Quesadillas (as seen in photo) and some sort of giant sub sandwich.

Yummy!

Sounds Good! What Else?!

In case you haven’t seen our place, we’ll definitely give tours. We also have a Pool Table and an awesome Foosball Table for people to play (just no spinning the rods!).

Want to RSVP?

Leave us a comment on this post, and be sure to say who you are. We’re looking forward to seeing you all!

Custom "Hours Logged" Messages in Freshbooks

2008-03-30T21:47:00Z

If you’re a regular reader of the BrightMix blog (Google Reader anyone?), you are probably well aware of the fact that we do things a little differently here. Since joining the company a little over a month ago, I’ve quickly learned to love the BrightMix way of doing business. It’s pretty safe to say that I drank the Kool Aid, and now I am hooked.

As Kevin and Dusty have mentioned in previous posts, a lot of our business tools live on the web. Sure, we all have Microsoft Office, but I’ve honestly only used it once.

One product that I’ve enjoyed working with so far is Freshbooks. They offer web-based time tracking/billing software. My personal experience has been limited to the time tracking piece, but I really like their interface. In fact, one of the high points in my day is to receive a hilarious confirmation message when I log my time. Unfortunately, the function that determines your message limits your odds of receiving a funny message, and will often display “Hours Logged,” instead.

Egregious!!!

I recently went through a rather long drought, receiving nothing but “Hours Logged” for a couple of weeks. So I did what any good user would do – I made a feature request to give me more control over my messages. Freshbooks responded promptly, and has opened a new post for suggesting new funny messages.

Before clicking “Log Hours”

After clicking “Log Hours,” I usually receive the boring “Hours Logged” message

Greasemonkey – That Funky Monkey

The response was great, but fell short of my ultimate goal – ridding my life of the much too corporate “Hours Logged” message. Luckily, Kevin and Dusty value funny messages almost as much as they value me logging billable hours, and they gave me the green light to work out a script to override the Freshbooks function.

To do this, I used Greasemonkey, which is an Add-on for Firefox that allows you customize the way a web page looks or behaves using JavaScript. This was my first experience with GreaseMonkey, and it was rather enjoyable…

The process was pretty painless: find the function on the Freshbooks page that determines the confirmation message, create a modified version of that function in my user script, and have Greasemonkey tell the page to call my function instead of the one on the page. I think I spent more time brainstorming additional messages than actually writing the meat of the script.

Check out the sampler button below, which has been modified to never display “hours logged” and has some additional messages picked by us BrightMix’ers... (Note: if you’re reading this through a feedreader, you’re probably going to have to come to this page to see it in action.)

Try Logging your Hours! (click the button)

How to get your own custom messages:

Step 1: Use FireFox

Step 3: Download GreaseMonkey Here

Step 2: Download the Script Here

Step 4: Add custom messages to script as needed

Seven Months of Official Business

2008-03-26T06:02:00Z

This was suppose to be a six month post, but it got delayed on account of our being too busy to blog. So, here we are at roughly seven months of business, continuing to rock and/or roll…

Since our last post, at three’ish months of official business, a whole lot has happened.

We Hired an Awesome Developer!

Shortly before Xmas, we posted a listing to hire an ASP.NET developer, two months and a series of interviews later, we welcomed aboard Erin.

Erin just had her one month anniversary, and she seems to be enjoying her new position at BrightMix. She’s helped Dusty and myself adopt a new pattern for our ASP.NET development called Presenter First, a rendition of the ol’ Model View Presenter pattern. Presenter First has helped us write code that is inherently more automatically testable, something that is challenging to do in ASP.NET.

Erin also just recently launched her own blog, ErinHawkins.com. Good things will come from her blog, so add it to the feed reader nearest to you!

BrightMix’s First Company Outing (Many More to Come)

In line with our goal of providing an awesome place for developers to work, we had our first company-paid outing a few weeks ago. Since there’s only 3 of us working at BrightMix, we invited along some ringers ;-)

Why have frequent company outings? Well, because we like our employee(s), we want them to continue working with us, and we want them to feel appreciated.

If everyone is kicking booty at their work, it makes all the sense in the world to start the weekend early by taking Friday afternoon off for a fun-filled bowling excursion. Oh, and participate in the taking of some sweet jump shots!

Continuing Client Work

In early December, we began work with a company here in Omaha called Sojern. We can’t disclose any of the details about their company or product. But, rest assured, it’ll be a pretty big deal once it has launched, which should be happening shortly.

Similarly, we’re on the verge of launching another big website for our other major client. Details for that are also soon to come…

Ack! Apple Converts!

For the longest time, Dusty and I were big Apple haters. This was mostly due to our being forced to use the inferior Macintosh computers back in our younger years (Middleschool and Highschool). Recently, though, Apple has taken a drastic turn for the better, with its new PC hardware-based machines and unix-based operating system. We use MacBookPro’s exclusively for our Ruby on Rails development work now.

I also just recently jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. Oh iPhone, you’re oh-so glossy and lovable…

A Business Trip to Boston

In early January, Dusty and myself flew out to Boston to meet up with a potential client.

The result of it all? A new partnership and product under development, TripleSeat. TripleSeat will be a web-based application to help restaurants manage the booking and sales of their private dining rooms.

We expect to launch version 1.0 of TripleSeat this May, which is coming up shortly, so keep your peepers peeled.

Impending Summer Internship Program

Mostly recently, a lot of our focus been getting ready for our Summer Internship Program. The goal of our internship program is to create and launch a product of our own, as well as find some of the best up-and-coming developer/design talent around the area and hopefully teach them a whole lot about the creation and launch of a brand new Web 2.0 product.

We’ve had a ton of people send in applications – more than we ever expected. We’re currently in the process of conducting in-person interviews with our top candidates, and within two weeks, we’ll be making offers to three of them.

Party Pizzas and Foosball Anyone?

It’s the little things around the office that help differentiate our company from XYZ corp. A few weeks ago, while chatting with Erin, we (possibly just myself) determined that the office needed a toaster oven so we could actually bake stuff like party pizzas, pizza rolls, and chicken nuggs.

Additionally, at some point, it was determined that we needed a Foosball table for the front room of our office. Erin was extremely helpful in facilitating the attainment of the table; in fact, she pretty much found the thing and got it to our office – we just footed the bill. High five, Erin!

The Official BrightMix Open House Party

Since we started the biz, Dusty and I have touted how we’re going to have this glamourous, earth-shakingly awesome open house party. At first, we were going to host it at my house (since we used to work from there), but then we moved to a real office. Then, it got drearily cold for a few months…

Without further ado: the official BrightMix Open House Party will be on Friday, April 25th, starting at 4:30pm and ending… well, whenever it ends. We’ll be providing drinks (of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety), delicious snack foods (quesadillas, chips, etc.), and entertainment. We’ll be sending out more formal invites to our giant list of contacts.

Well, that wraps up our last few months of busy, busy business – stay tuned for more happenings!

Why You Should Attend Omaha Nexus

2008-03-17T07:01:00Z

I wanted to bring attention to an Omaha event that BrightMix is pleased to be a part of…. Omaha Nexus.

From their website…

Omaha Nexus is a non-profit philanthropic organization that hosts benefit events based on the accountable fundraising model. Our goal is to help others:

Contribute personal resources (time and money) to charity

Connect with people in the community

Celebrate life in the city

This is the inaugural event for the group, with the proceeds benefiting Campfire USA.

Here at BrightMix, we’re excited to be a part of the Omaha community of young professionals, and we feel that the Omaha Nexus model is a great way for us to connect with folks, and also to give back. As such, BrightMix will be paying for each of our “employees” (all three of us), and our significant others to attend the event.

We’re excited to see this group/event grow and flourish! We’d love to see you there!

Who’s Your Omaha Nexus?

Friday, April 11, 2008
8pm – Midnight
1316 Jones Street

Tickets: $50 includes drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and donation to Camp Fire USA
Early Bird price of $45 until March 24, 2008!

Other Great Internship Programs

2008-03-14T02:26:00Z

We make no bones about borrowing ideas from other successful companies, and our most recent idea – the internship program – is no exception. For those unfamiliar, I thought I’d take a minute to outline some of the people that we feel are offering some pretty innovative things when it comes to internships in tech companies…

Fog Creek http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/SummerIntern.html

The mother of all internships. Joel Spolsky is a master marketer, and his internship is no exception. He (seemingly) successfully parlayed one of his first summer internship programs into a successful product for Fog Creek – CoPilot. Joel writes about his experiences in a completely transparent manner, which we love. If we can be half as successful as they are, we’d take it.

We always give our interns a big project working on real, shipping software. For example, in 2005, all four of our interns teamed up to build a completely new product from the ground up. By the end of the summer, they had launched Fog Creek Copilot to paying customers.

Jackson Fish http://www.jacksonfish.com/atelier/

These guys have a young company like we do, and we often link to them because, well, its some of the best writing around. This posting about their internship is everything that I wish our job posting could be.

What we also have however is a program that gives you the opportunity to ship actual software that your friends and family can see, use, and love. This is not an experience where you’ll help out on a small feature in someone else’s product. Instead you’ll build an entire piece of software, from conception to launch, that you and your fellow interns can deliver.

FreshView http://www.freshview.com/intern/

Creators of one of the most beautiful and simple-yet-extremely-effective pieces of web software out there – CampaignMonitor. These guys are in Australia, and have an internship program not unlike the others. Free lunches, fun projects, etc.

You’ll be given a real project to work on and get exposed to everything from coding, interface design, marketing, support and testing, all while mastering the mysterious art of ping pong.

What do all thse internships (and our own) have in common you ask? Well, the common thread amongst almost all of them is their emphasis on SHIPPING SOFTWARE. Hillel from JacksonFish sums it up quite eloquently...

Whether or not you come to Jackson Fish for the summer, make sure you go somewhere you get to ship. Shipping is what counts. Shipping is how you grow and learn. Shipping is what’s fun.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. I often tell people that our interns are actually going to do things. They’re going to create things. We’re not just going to stick them in the corner and have them shred papers. Nope, not unlike Joel’s interns or the others, we want our internship program to be about building a product. Because, well, that’s what would be fun for US, if we were interns; its a great learning experience, and a great resume builder.

Know of any other great internship programs? Link ‘em up in the comments, we’d love to hear about them!!