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America Online, Inc. is an enormous company with over 5000 employees.
Their corporate headquarter is located in Dulles, Virginia. AOL has eight buildings located at their Dulles campus.
They have a corporate headquarter, six buildings containing the majority of their employees for a variety of departments,
and a network operations center. I was located in Creative Center 2 on the Dulles Campus. One of the first things
that will catch your attention at AOL is the relaxed atmosphere. My first manager told me that he could always tell when
a new employee was around because they were so overdressed. Most employees dress casually and hours are
relaxed. Employees could work a variety of hours as long as they work eight hours in the day and it was convenient for their team. This made
for a comfortable and layed back work environment. It allowed for employees to set their schedules to better deal
with northern Virginia traffic. This was convenient for me because I had a long commute so I tended to show
up earlier so I could also leave earlier and avoid traffic. Meetings were generally
setup in the late morning or early afternoon to accommodate everyone. For most of the summer I worked in Host Quality
Assurance in a group called AOL Wallet. If you do not have AOL I’m sure you have used a similar product on Amazon
or other site. AOL Wallet is able to hold on to AOL user’s credit card information as well as billing and shipping
information and will fill appropriate shopping fields when necessary. The other group I worked for was for the spam
filtering team. This team is vital as AOL has gotten bad press in the past for not having good spam filtering
programs.
2.2 My Job
I worked for two different groups while I was there. It was originally
planned for me to work on AOL Wallet for the entire summer but they were creating a whole new Wallet structure and
they wouldn’t have had enough
work for me to do my first few weeks. So I worked for a manager I have worked for in a past internship helping to do
some research on a website and then worked with the spam team. We were looking at different types of spam and
analyzing what categories they fell under as well as trying to come up with ideas to counter. This proved to be difficult
because spammers are clever and have used a variety of tricks to try and beat the spam filters. We worked as human
spam filters and analyzed different spam messages and worked on coming up with ideas to change filtering according
to what we saw spammers trying to do. This was an interesting experience and though I only worked on it for a
few weeks learned a lot about how spam filtering works. After this I went to the AOL Wallet team and my first task
was to learn the system and during this learning process I was also updating the previous test plan to reflect
the newest changes. My technical writing skills that I learned in TSC 210 were useful during this stage and having become
familiar with flowcharts and Visio in CS 345 it was easy to pick those skills back up. Another side project
was assisting a group in documenting web access for an application called turboweb. This document was posted on their internal
site and used by several team members. I also tested screenname security features
and found a few bugs. I worked with a member of the development team to pinpoint the source of the error.