Can't speak highly enough of the Khan Academy internship experience--I interned with Kasra last summer and it was a pretty incredible few months. From the team to the mission to the culture to the work itself, it's A+ all around. If you're looking for a software internship, I highly recommend applying.
(By the way: the Khan Academy iPad app actually shipped _today_. Congrats to everyone back at Khan HQ!)
We've been pretty insistent on colocation for internships in particular, just because we think synchronous and serendipitous interactions are really important in these kind of apprenticeships.
But I'd love to be wrong and discover a way to achieve the same quality of results remotely and asynchronously.
Looking at that made me think about us back in the brick-and-mortar version of Khan Academy, us in the university. Our analogous tools like mastering physics and webassign, while they have improved, pale in comparison to Khan Academy's up and coming tools.
Wonderful write-up and I'm happy to see some details and work that didn't make it into production get some attention here. It's often those exercises that we discard that make us better at what we do.
Are internships still only for people still in college? That's what I always thought, but I read some articles recently that indicated some programmers with 15-20 years experience are going around and working "paid internships". (I don't really understand the difference between that and a plain old contract.)
I went through a paid internship. In my case it was for a couple of reasons:
1) I was underqualified for the position that I applied for. So they offered the internship.
2) Since I did not have a lot of (work) experience I guess it was a gamble for them to employ me "just like that". So it could be seen also as an qualifications test maybe.
3) Visas are hard(ish) so not employing me made it, let's just say more legal. Paperworkswise I've been working as a freelancer for their branch in a different country.
While you may be correct in general, this is the guy who wrote the parenthetical at the end of the article who (presumably) runs Khan Academy's internship program.
That's interesting, thanks. Khan academy has been on my crush list for a while, it's fun to consider taking a break from consulting work to apply for an internship...
Where can I find the source code for the scratchpad work. I would like to take a look at it to understand it better since this could be an excellent addon to an educational app I am building for my kids.
I tried playing the video of the scaling down video animation on safari on iOS and every time I closed the video it would immediately pop back up. I had to quit safari actually to get out of the loop.
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(By the way: the Khan Academy iPad app actually shipped _today_. Congrats to everyone back at Khan HQ!)