Back in September IJW hired a college student who had done all his studies but not the coops. He wanted to do 2 coops straight (8 months). His name is Mike and his 8 months are nearing the end. We're going to end up keeping him as a full time employee. I've got kind of a funny story to tell about him..

When we hired him, we needed someone skilled in web development to work independantly on several projects. After his college training (and no previous programming experience) he needed a lot of help at first. For the first 4 months I designed his classes, functions, loops, logic etc.. and guided him through what I needed him to make. It's now been about 6 months on this one project and hopefully he'll be done soon. What I had him make is dam impressive and powerful. This is the kind of thing no college prepares you for and isn't a dinky read/write data from a database kind of web app. He's come a very long way since he first started and lately has been doing more work independantly which is excellent. Well anyway, often I help him test his program and break it over and over and have him make changes. We're used to seeing crashes and bugs but they always get worked out in time until I ask for a change hehe. Bugs are fine, as long as they are fixed by the time the product is released.

Today for the first time he started using one of my programs to feed his web app data to work with. He ran into a couple bugs in my stuff and you should have seen his reaction! He was so thrilled to see me have bugs in my software too and was making jokes about it and going on about it! That's ok, I thought it was pretty funny too. I can't describe the excitement he had when he was telling me about the bugs. It's like I gave him the impression I never make mistakes and write flawless code all the time :) hehehe Well we both had a good laugh then I fixed my bugs. It's great having other people help test my stuff and give me opinions about the user interface.