Job

[eyeRmonkey]

Boring story that you shouldn't read:

I was hanging out in an AIM chatroom for woot.com the other day and I asked if anyone was from Oregon. One guy told me he was from Eugene (where I am currently going to college).

I started talking to him in an IM and found out he worked for Sun freaking Microsystems. He ended up offering to send my resume to a friend of his for a job.

A couple days later (before I had a chance to send out my resume) I got an email from his friend telling me about the job and asking for a phone interview.

Here's what the job is about: CDDB on crack. Every possible imaginable detail about every song/artist/album.

I'm going to be doing data entry and writing PHP scripts to go out to the internet and find this info and enter it into XML/MySQL databases.

I need to learn PHP, XML, and MySQL in the next weeks before I have a real interview with him.

He asked me how much I should get per hour and I said $10, but I was on the spot and (in retrospect) I wish I had asked for $15/hour.

The best part is I can do it all from my dorm and he wants me to work full time over the summer.

If this project goes big, I'll have been with it from the start. I'm pretty excited about it.

[si_the_geek]

That sounds good, congratulations!

Money isn't everything, so don't worry too much about that - it is much more important to enjoy what you are doing. In time I'm sure you'll be able to ask for a raise, as you will have more experience.. and you never know, they may even give you more than you asked for.

[grilkip]

This is good, this may even be better than the Intel gig.

Cheers.

[Squab 14]

Good for you!

[penagate]

Hey eyeR mate. Haven't spoken in ages.

That sounds like a great opportunity. Even if you don't get much pay out of it, you get experience, and something flash to add to your resume. Hope you enjoy it.

[moeur]

Don't get sidetracked from your studies.
Make sure you graduate, that is the best way to get the good jobs.

[eyeRmonkey]

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I appreciate it.

Yeah. The experience will be priceless.

And I will most definitely stay up on my homework and such. He sounded really willing to work with my school schedule.

I already picked up the PHP syntax. Now I just need to get some experience with MySQL seeing as how I have never used it. Same goes for XML.

Anyone have some project ideas I could attempt to complete? The main thing I'm going to be doing is parsing stuff out of webpages and putting it in XML or a database.

[penagate]

php.net/dom - You can use this both to parse HTML pages and to output XML documents.

php.net/mysqli - mysqli PHP API for MySQL.

You could try parsing a list of threads from VBForums.

[eyeRmonkey]

Cool. Good idea.

I'll just figure out most of the MySQL stuff as I go.

I found a cool program called Wampserver. It installs Apache, PHP, and MySQL all at once and gives you a nice interface for working with them all. Quick and easy.