mistakes of my internship
Hey everyone!! I hope you’re doing well. Today I felt like sharing something which changed the way I used to think about software engineering and networking in general.
I learnt at least 3 ways to not do things from my internship experience (2017 from May to July).
Let’s quickly dive into them:-
❌ Backing out of the given task without giving it my all: —
I was asked to make some automation code for headless browser and deploy it using Docker. I was very interested in Python at that time. There was scope of using Python for achieving this whole thing. But I hit a blocker where not much was available on Google. The blocker code was in Perl. My mentor also gave me a dry run of what possibly the code might be doing. But in my mind, I had already quit this task. There was this strong bias to create something which I can show at my college as a full stack project. I communicated my thoughts to my mentor and though he wasn’t happy with my decision he re-assigned me to other person who has done Django and can takeover from there.
❌ Not understanding what software engineering is : —
I was asked to create a Kanban Task Manager (this happened iteratively) with following features :-
- User Profiles (Registration, Login and Profiles)
- Task with priority, date, privacy , tagging people/groups etc.
- Three segregations for Todo, In Progress and Done with drag and drop support.
- Editing the task, deleting the task and each task can have comments from users with permissions to view it.
- Connections requests and notifications.
For a person with no knowledge of web development, this was a lot but thanks to the iterative nature of requirements, I was hooked and in the end developed the project as per requirement.
Though I regretted backing out from initial task, I was proud of what I achieved in span of 45 days. But I don’t remember a single bit of it now!!!
And there was a simple reason.
My process of developing the project was really bad. I did follow tutorials to develop a mock library app and then jumped to make my project from scratch but all the problems I encountered were fulfilled by endless copy paste of code from the Internet with me using stuff as blackbox. There was no real retention of concepts and just ad hoc software development !
❌ Not networking with other people : —
I am an introvert. But I am better than before. During that time, I failed to talk to anyone and network with them. This is the dumbest thing I did.
Luckily I realized all the above 3 things as mistakes and didn’t repeat them since my career started.
Now I want to have : —
✅ Ownership of tasks.
✅ A defined process of software engineering.
✅ Networking with people to learn from them and give back whenever possible to the community.
I am still a work in progress like anyone. I still sometimes struggle on the aspects discussed but I am clear on what not to do if I want to move ahead.
My father says : —
“You will laugh at few things 3 years from now just like you laugh at your internship experience . Learning is gradual but rewarding experience”.