Dan Michniewicz's blog

My last week as an intern. I took Wednesday off to pick my family up from the airport. The rest of the week was spent finishing up the radial toolbar documentation. This included having it peer reviewed and edited, as well as making changes after each. I also did a little side project for the usability group. They had me document the changes in the user interface (menus, toolbars) that happened from the last release to the current one.

At the beginning of the week I spent some time revising the roles documentation after our editor had sent back her changes. She changed a lot, but she realized that this was a new process for me so she made sure to comment on almost all of her changes. Most of the changes she made were more of what Carey pointed out during the peer review. She removed lots of unnecessary phrases and pointed out a couple of places where I was inconsistent with terminology. This was my first real contribution of written material that users will end up seeing. Exciting stuff? Not really.

This week started with a developer named Sergey reviewing my new roles documentation for technical correctness. He pointed out to me that the way I had described one function “editing a role” was incorrect. He explained to me that the “editing a role” function did not work the way most people (even people at Siemens PLM Software) thought it would.

I began this week testing the last of the context sensitive help. Same old same old. On Tuesday I started a new project that included collaborating with my aunt. There is a feature in NX called "roles". These roles can be system default or user created and they are basically pre-packaged user interface designs. My project is to edit the help on the topic and include features that were left out when the original documentation was written. This is my first real opportunity to create new content for the online help.

This week I only worked on Monday and Tuesday. Thursday and Friday were Holiday days for the Fourth of July for the whole office and I took Wednesday off to spend time with my cousin and Aunt who were in town to visit for a few days. On Monday and Tuesday I spent most of my time working on the CAST tutorial. I ended up learning a lot about the product and the countless amounts of functions at the user’s disposal. Since the tutorial is so large, I only was only able to complete a small fraction of the entire thing.

The first day at the office was predictably uneventful. I got settled into my cubicle and was sent to work filling out some paperwork for my employment. I spent most of the day meeting co-workers and getting shown around the office. After I was set up with an account and password to access my computer, my supervisor, Gregg, started to show me some of the things I would help work on in the next seven weeks. He also directed me towards the corporate style guide and he started up the NX software and let me play around a bit in it.