My internship experience at a startup
It was just a whole new experience throughout the 6 months of journey working in a startup which carried so much memories that will be long lasted. I was being given position as front-end developer at a healthy event-tech startup.
Early Days
The initial days, I was doing R&D in Vue.js(A javascript Framework). The thing was that CTO had given this task from very first day and reason for this was the one of the product’s dashboard was built on this technology.
After some days through doing R&D, I was given the source code of whole project on which I had to work. The codebase was like the real warehouse where which components and modules would do specific task. Also there was much more abstraction level that I got to know through documentation that the former employee had written. Really, I’d say that documentation is a good skill that every employee should have that would benefit both to company and future employees.
In between I worked on some website of their client, but I wrote code that was too buggy and without standards. Senior developer had issued this to me to improve your code and use proper standards for writing it.
Two weeks had passed I was given a new responsibility — to refactor company’s website from backbone.js to simple html form due to some SEO issues. Now, this was some serious work. I kept starring the whole code structure and finally managed to start working. What I learned from this was that transforming a thing from complex one to simple one needs skill of understanding the code how it works in general. Through a week I hacked into and built the target code structure with proper SEO. Also I managed to write some JavaScript (which I 😍 most) to enable functionality in the website.
Through Midway
Now I was on the path for gaining more expertise on HTML and CSS because the next project given to me was to code an actual theme from PSD(theme designed by graphic designer). There were many themes, but were distributed among other interns. Themes were part of the core product of the company. And then I kept improving on the design side of the web. On the way I learned how to use chrome developer tools to measure on which attributes does the element appears perfect according to design and then improve code.
There were many issues that were noted by designers like pixel-perfect design, browser compatibility and viewing the website in mobile-view and tablet-view which didn’t had proper UI. I had to improve more on writing media queries which would eliminate those device perspective issues.
Through these all working hours, I’d managed to learn and improve the things when I was at home. So if one needs to be in flow at same time, then he should sacrifice the comfort-ness at that period.
Now I was in charge to develop one single page website to improve the needs of digital marketing team. Through coding this project, I came across many cool web libraries, dependencies and satisfying needs according to digital marketing manager. These all interactions with marketing guy would develop a sneak-peak for me that which kind of traffic he wants, the target audience and social media approach.
Hustle, Hustle and more…
Doing internship was the good part, but attending college was tiresome. In fact I had to manage both for many days in between which would take life out when I’d leave office at 9 sometimes or 8:30. Difficult part was to concentrate on work more when attending college for half-day and remaining hours I would come to office for my afternoon shift. All these lead to a major life-sucks moments but I carried on to concentrate on work for creating more productivity in me.
I now had moved back in to that old project of product dashboard which was built with Vue.js on frontend. Both Frontend(Vue) and backend(Node.js) of dashboard had always something to do with JavaScript and I concentrated more on this language as I had more programming soul than creativity. Also I had more grasp in Vue.js as I had developed more code in that area by working on dashboard.
There were more late nights at office where I had spend watching football and playing Counter-Strike with colleagues. Also had hangout playing paintball games and much more.
My “Bond” with Code
I am saying that when we write code, then it’s not like to only write it for sake of solving company’s need. The code looks much worse when it is not written in proper manner(standards) for respective language whether it should be HTML, CSS or Javascript.
There should be some standard for writing code. The Styleguide for code was main protocol among the senior developers that every coder should follow. And that proved a major breakthrough for me and I had to refactor my own written code which proved cumbersome. So, I started writing single line of code in that manner from that day onwards in whichever language I would code. I had moved to SCSS from CSS as it is more approachable in terms of nesting, cleaner code and better syntax. So again refactoring came…
The common scenario where I was mostly trained was working under the pressure. There were times when CTO would operate by sitting besides me to monitor the workflow. Obviously this was the duty for me to work with that kind of effort that will solve the particular problem in fastest way. So this was the good outcome as one would adopt before moving into corporate world.
The Conclusion
The day came when I had completed my whole 6-month internship with so much excitement and curiosity. The possible outcome from this for me was to learn all the basics of coding, working in real projects and managing balance between college and Internship.
There’s much more things I have gained by working in this energetic startup but I won’t mention due to length of this story. Also people their were always supportive and eager to help to put in the hard work.
Currently I am in last year(8th Semester) of my Computer Science Engineering Degree. Also I have started working at new company for full-stack developer position with managing both college shift and company shift.
Some experienced people say that I’ve started working at more early age than theirs, but I had said always that it is the curiosity maybe eagerness for me to start learning new things as early as possible. That’s the only reason that I would tell when people ask and obviously age doesn’t matter but enthusiasm does!
That’s all, thanks for reading this article and happy coding! 💻
