Patrick Donoghue – ScraperWiki https://blog.scraperwiki.com Extract tables from PDFs and scrape the web Tue, 09 Aug 2016 06:10:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6 58264007 Internship – Scraperwiki https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2014/05/758221722/ Sun, 25 May 2014 19:23:32 +0000 https://blog.scraperwiki.com/?p=758221722 Hi, I am Patrick. I am currently in Year 10 at the British International School of Stavanger. As part of our curriculum, we are required to have one week of work experience. For my work experience, I worked at Scraperwiki from May 12 to 16 (2014). I found it a real privilege to be able to work at Scraperwiki and am extremely thankful for all the support and help from all of the team! I have an interest in programming and being with other programmers has been a very informative experience.

The first day, when I arrived in the office, I met all the team and was quickly set to work by Francis programming my first scraper. At first, I had no idea where to start, however Peter was very helpful at getting me started and pointing me in the right direction. I started coding with Jq, which was a language I never programmed in before, so it took a while for me to get used to it. I finished coding it on Tuesday, but then Francis asked me to put it on a Git-hub repository. It took me half of Wednesday to figure out how to make the repository (With help from Ian).

After I finished what Francis asked me to do, he asked me to code it in Python. At that stage, I was familiar with Python but was far from being able to code a scraper with it. Dragon, seeing I was having trouble coding the scraper, showed me what to do. It took me a while to grasp it, but on Thursday, I had got my results, and had organised them in the way Francis asked me to. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it ready for Show and Tell, so I did not have that much to show.

On Thursday, we had a retrospective, which was basically us putting things on a board and choosing which was the most important. I found it interesting to see the different things that popped up as I was not sure about what everyone was working on. I had to say all the things that satisfied us from the week, which was probably the biggest list, however I found it fun as many of the things sparked discussions. When the retrospective was finished, we got to eat the cupcakes Francis brought in, which were extremely rich, but still delicious.

The team at Scraperwiki were really helpful (and very patient!) as well as very friendly. Almost every day I joined them for lunch, which was pretty fun as I got to listen to them talk about work and and explain things to me. 3 out of the 5 days I was there, I ate from Shirley Valentines, which made fantastic sandwiches.

I had an amazing time at Scraperwiki, and am glad I chose there as my work experience. Hopefully, Francis will keep me busy, and I will stay in touch with the team.

Thank you guys! 😛 [contact-form-7]

Patrick

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