My Summer internship at TazWorks
Date: 2019-5-27
Week One
I got an internship at TazWorks during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. I worked with the marketing team and focused on web development and search engine optimization.
How I got the internship
I live in Arizona and every Christmas, I go to Utah to celebrate with family. My aunt had been working at TazWorks for a couple years and loved it. When she found out I was looking for an internship, she offered to ask around to see if anyone could use a computer science related intern. The marketing team was preparing for a big push on their website SEO and wanted someone to focus on that project.
What I worked on
This is where I come in. I was tasked with the job of figuring out how to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on the public website. I was given access to the side using Wordpress and tools like Yoast and SEMrush. The first day, I mostly learned about TazWorks and how it operates. TazWorks sells the software (SaaS) to process background checks. They develop the software and organize databases and sell that because preforming the background tests is a legal minefield.
About Tazworks
Everyone seems to love working at TazWorks. There is a "we can do anything" startup feel at TazWorks because that's actually how it started. There are now 73 employees. Except for some remote employees, everyone works out of the same office. The confounder's office is 2 seconds away from my desk. We talked about mountain biking on Tuesday.
Lunch and snacks
Every Tuesday, there is free catered food and weekly lunch announcements. (note to self: I should do this if I have money and a company) Like any modern tech company, TazWorks has a large snack bar and soda machine for its employees to use. They even have a blender with fruit. The soda machine makes things hard because it is free but it is really unhealthy. Sometimes, Nate (head of HR) puts on a game. On Friday, it was Jacksbox tv. This game is about solving a problem and having other players vote on it because it was funny.
That's great in all but what did you actually do?
I was putting off talking about this because it got pretty boring quick. The largest part of SEO is making good looking Google results and keywords. So I made these look pretty:
The novelty wears off because the website is big and has a lot of blog posts. I need to make these (and likely more in the future) for every page:
- Slug - see if I need to shorten it Ex: /all-about-the-founder-Bob-Somye to just /Bob-Somye
- SEO title (the blue link) Sometimes the page title is too short or too long
- Meta description (page summary) It is usually is garbage from the first paragraph so I change it
- Keyword (what I want this page to show up for) Ex: background screening platform
- Synonyms (more keywords in other words) Ex: background check, TazCloud, SaaS, CRA
It gets kind of boring after a while.
I have 6 pages in MS Word with information of at least 20 web pages that I have completed. There is still a lot more to do. So I took a break halfway through Friday to research if there were more ways to rank higher in Google. Web page speed is one place tazworks.com can improve in. It makes ~200 requests when loading. That should be around 30. And the server takes about 2000ms to send the html file. I am going to talk about this in the meeting next week.
So for right now, I am going to try to finish as much SEO as I can and hope that I can move on to more interesting work later.
Why this is good
Even though this is not going as well as I imagined, I have still learned a lot and have been exposed to alternate viewpoints(more on that in a second). Now I know for a fact, I do not want to get a career in SEO. And I'm really not one for traditional marketing either. The company itself is great. I will model my organization after my experience at TazWorks. Things like being able to organize quick short meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page and just having good people with no drama. I with more companies invested in their employees because I have seen multiple instances where it has indirectly benefited the company through time or resources.
Alternate viewpoints
I bring this up because I agree with less extreme Stallman ideology and have been trying to move away from Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google. These companies lock down their products and when the product loses support, the servers shutdown and what you bought is unusable. Or the company could turn off functionality to make a new product more appealing. I firmly believe that if you own something, it is a right for you to be able to fix and modify it at your own risk.
How TazWorks exposes me to alternate viewpoints
TazWorks' core product is a SaaS(Software as a service). Previously, I disagreed with this business model but in this situation, I see how it is beneficial. It is kind of funny though, it uses pretty much everything that is propriety; Outlook, Windows 10 (One person had KDE Linux or BSD so yay), MS team management software, wordpress themes and plugins.
I understand this approach. SaaS just works, they have more important things to spend time on than troubleshooting and can pay for the premium of it. That might work for businesses but it prevents hobbyists and others that do not have very much money from making things.
Conclusion
I don't want to go into SEO, I should work at a cool company or just start my own, it is up to you to make things worthwhile and/or fun and that there are some situations where SaaS works better.
Also that blogs take a lot of time to write. This is my first blog, likely more content unrelated to internships coming later.
Week Two
SEO Progress
I spent pretty much the entire week trying to finish SEO for all of the blog posts and finished it just in time to leave on Friday. I set goals to finish them as fast as possible and I was able to average 1 page every 10 minutes.
Town Hall (Company lunch meeting)
This week I was given kudos by Kary Burns. He pointed out that I was doing all of the SEO way faster than he thought I would.
Full time projects
I also found that when working on something full time, you get a lot done. Especially when you do not switch projects when you get board with them. By working this long, I went through all ~250 pages on the tazworks.com blog.
Week Three
My major focus this week was SEMrush, a tool that rates a website's performance and costs a couple hundred dollars a month.
SEMrush
SEMrush scores the website out of a hundred percent and lists errors, warnings, and notices.
It does this by scraping pages and initially, I had a good score because it only crawled the first 100 pages and there are ~400 to the entire site. When I set it to do all of the pages, the score went to around 73% and was lower than before.
How I (might have) broke the website
Most of the warnings in SEMrush were about uncompressed and unminified javascript and css. So I just needed to run a compressor and that will solve all of those problems right? Nope. It broke an XML generator and squished another picture and we realized this on the live site.
I fixed the logo and the support guys fixed the XML so it was not the end of the world lol.
Back to Arizona
I also took Friday off to go and visit my family and do a Spartan race. We also went to the Grand Canyon because that was 30 minutes out of the way. It was a lot of fun and I got a little homesick because I had to leave so soon.
Week Four
General errors
This week I found out that everyone has access to the General chanel in Teams (like discord). I was not setup with this and needed to be setup with a ticket but the ticket was in general.
At the time, I needed access to Hubspot(client tracking platform) to look at the "contact us" form on the main site to determine the value that one submission or page views had.
Unconfirmed stats
I came up that one form submission would occur every 2 days and would be worth $800. This has that "bad math" feel and there were too many factors that makes this data unreliable. I needed a larger data group to be accurate
It did not help that I could not access the download button to ge the complete details but I eventually moved on to other projects the next week.
Week Five
Real Programming!
It is only Tuesday and It is already the best week so far. --Me that Tuesday
Python web scraping
I couldn't find anything else to do with SEMrush, Yoast and Hubspot and it turned out that it was perfect timing.
Automate the boring things with Python©
At this point in working at TazWorks, I was running out of things to do.
Initially, I was told to go to a website and copy all of the results and format it into a csv.
It was funny too because they felt bad giving me what they thought was grunt work but it was the most fun so far.
It only took me a couple hours to make the script and learn Beautiful Soup (html scraping library).
At the end, I had a CSV with all of the companies and no duplicates.
Week Six
The fast week
I ran out of things to do on Monday(and my bos was not there) and spent it researching prerunner. I found that SoftEther uses SSL and I can easily replicate the transport layer in Python. This would allow it to work over the internet. This project is overly large so I used that time to work on the MVP (minimum viable product). Prerunner is now going to be a subnet to subnet easy addressing system.
Rebuilding a Wordpress site
TazWorks creates and sponsors events to gain more clients and one of the events needed a site. I was tasked with converting an old event site(TUG) into a site for a dinner series between 7 companies.
Note: www.fivestarhootenanny.com is a one event site and is likely broken/out of date when you see this.
College and scholarships
On Wednesday, I got a call from Northern Arizona University saying that my application had been approved. Now I just need to submit SAT or ACT scores to see if I can get the Deans scholarship. Or look at community college again.
Week Seven
Spoiled
TazWorks is probably one of the best companies to work for. Everyone is super nice and will go out of their way to help with anything.
Multiple time during this internship, I went mountain biking with some of the company. There is a chicken in the picture because of Scott, the co-founder in the back. This is him teasing his co-worker Joe about going with them. Each egg is a ride without Joe. :P
Fixing a problem when no one could figure it out
After lunch on Friday, I was the only one on the marketing team in the office. There there was an error on the website where some elements would not load.
I was able to fix this after trying different things to make th site work. I found out the next week that one of the other employee spent hours trying to figure it out remotely.
Week Eight
My last week at TazWorks
I am kind of sad to go. I enjoy working at TazWorks more than High School most of the time.
This week was spent polishing everything I did. Google Ads, Tazworks website, the event website. I trained an employee on how import and export data from Zoominfo.
My boss can't find any more short term projects for me to work on so I am now finishing the blog and video.
Thanks TazWorks
To say thank you to TazWorks, I gave them one of the hardest puzzles I have seen. There is a puzzle table and a lot of people take short brakes to put it together