The bulk of my summer, I was working as a Program Manager intern at RealNetworks (the RealPlayer company). There were two main projects I was working on this summer.

Project #1: Write a functional specification for the Rhapsody client (the application that manages their music subscription service). Though Rhapsody already existed, there was almost no documentation on it–the only way you could learn about the product was to ask other people about it. Unfortunately, this becomes a problem when very knowledgeable people leave the company. My job was to gather all the technical information from everyone and document it. Because there is so much different functionality in Rhapsody, this project took roughly 6 weeks.

Project #2: Instrument Omniture into the Rhapsody client. My job was to write a technical document to describe how to instrument Omniture (a web analytics product) into the Rhapsody client. This would allow the company to track user usage data to answer important business questions. At first, this was difficult because I didn’t know anything about Omniture (and their online help documents were not very helpful). Finding good resources about Omniture and learning about the product took about 3 weeks. Eventually, I was able to create a roadmap to divide this project into separate phases, each with details about the technical implementation. The team is using this document to guide them as they work on instrumenting Omniture–in fact, they have already started work on Phase 1!

I faced many challenges in the scary work world, but I felt that I had a valuable experience as an intern at RealNetworks. It was a good opportunity to work with many technical, experienced, and smart people. I also felt that I did meaningful work that will actually be put to use. In short, if you’re thinking about doing an internship, I highly recommend it!

Other than work, work, and work, I went to San Jose and San Francisco for a few days in August. We were visiting my brother who was interning at Adobe, and just going around and exploring the Bay Area. I also spent a lot of time at home playing with my little brother, now 9 years old! He’s a big kid now.

That pretty much sums up my summer .