The Joy of Flex

We’re looking for a summer intern developer on the Buzzword team in Newton, Mass. If you are interested, start with the official Adobe job position, click “apply now” to get yourself into the system, and feel free to email me at dcoletta at adobe dot com with any questions. Or, if you know someone who might be interested, please forward them this post or the link to the job. Also, if you’re a blogger, please do me a favor and repost!

Here’s the gist of the job:

Position Overview

Buzzword, the first real word processor for the web, is a breakthrough in collaborative authoring for documents that matter. The Buzzword team has recently joined Adobe Systems Incorporated to take Buzzword to the next level, building new features, integrating with amazing new Adobe software products, and scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users.

The Buzzword application is built on the Adobe Flash/Flex platform, written primarily in ActionScript 3.0, an object-oriented language based on ECMAScript 4.0 and familiar to people who know Java and C#. Additionally, Buzzword incorporates a server that is written in C# using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server 2005.

The Buzzword team is looking for a software development intern to join us for the summer. You should be a computer science major (or equivalent) headed into your junior or senior year, with a passion for writing great code, learning new technologies, and discovering just what it takes to build commercial software. You’ll receive mentoring from the Buzzword team, and you’ll see every part of the software lifecycle: requirements, design, coding, testing, and release

Responsibilities

• Prototyping additional browser support: Buzzword relies on some small but critical bits of JavaScript to support keyboard control and system clipboard access, so we are currently limited to IE, Firefox, and Safari. You would prototype versions of this code for other browsers.
• Bug fixing: there’s no better way to learn your way around a big code base than by fixing some bugs.
• Load and/or performance testing: In order to gauge future hardware needs, you would write a load simulator for our server, execute it, and analyze the results.
• Building tools for analyzing client error reports: Buzzword has a built-in error reporting mechanism that allows it to send a crash report to the server for later analysis. Current analysis is a manual process; you would write a tool for improving that process.
• Writing tests: Buzzword has a built-in automated test framework, with hundreds of existing tests that exercise product functionality and check for bug regression. You would write new tests, and analyze existing tests to remove duplicate functionality and improve coverage.
• Experimenting with Buzzword mashups: there are many unexplored possibilities for mashing Buzzword with other applications on both the client side (in the browser) and the server side.
• Site statistics analysis tools: both the Buzzword server and Google Analytics gather ongoing server usage statistics; you would improve on them and build new ways to look at how our users use the product.

Again, next step is to see the official Adobe job position, and feel free to email me at dcoletta at adobe dot com with any questions. (This position is located in Newton, MA.)

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