My Intern Diary!
I got an internship yayyyyy!!!
Might seem like a normal thing for many tech geeks but it is definitely a big thing for me because I nowhere drowned into Tech since my school but I do love tech. Many people who get an internship in a startup or any MNC are the ones who say “ I love coding and have been doing it since 9th”. When I was in 9th, I was waiting for my crush to respond to my messages. Engineering was my forte as becoming a doctor was way too hard for my reach. Choosing a branch was tough, but somehow my inner gut said that computer science would serve me good.
The first year of college was breezy, I was lurking here and there looking was stuff to learn but learned nothing. Second year is when I realized I can’t sit like this staring the window outside my class, then I started learning Android. Why Android?! One, I like Android. Two, I find it intimidating in order to overcome it I learn and learn and learn. Thank you to Udacity, for teaching me Android the best way one can, with all that earthquake, burger and animal shelter examples.
After one year of consistent learning, not focusing in actual academics, getting scolded by teachers for getting low internals as I didn’t give a shot in those college books but I had my own learnings through net and stuff, I got an INTERNSHIP!
Internship was something I wanted to do. I read a lot of perks of doing it and hence I was captivated towards the idea. I applied to whichever platform I found, made a Resume, followed a lot of my seniors, took pieces of advice, pinged them hard and kind of made a portfolio of myself. Slowly, responses came and interviews began. My first interview was from a startup, I went totally unprepared, no wonder I got rejected. That hit me really hard. Luckily the same week another interview was scheduled and I thought I’d give it my best. I prepared for two days reading developers.com from tip to toe and guess what? I cracked this! Posting was in Bangalore, that was a plus for me!!
Skipping the entire process of me coming to Bangalore and settling down, let’s get to the first week of my internship.
I joined on the 3rd of June, everybody of us got introduced. Before I joined the actual office, I was given certain tasks and assignments, asked to constantly read docs and articles so that I get an abrupt idea of what’s happening, how far they have come and what is my role till my intern period.
I learned all the topics quickly and came there and we did a small briefing, talked about common stuff and then discussed a lot of key points and started the work. I knew that internship would be hard and a lot of brainstorming happens, but never experienced. The first week of my internship was the hardest week I’ve ever had in my life. As a computer science student, I code in fact a lot. But sitting in a sit confined in a room and coding for 10 hours was not regular for me. The first two days were damn tough, we had a lot of meetings, drew a lot of diagrams which I had to understand stepwise, I had to sometimes replicate back to my peers the summary of the meeting and also explain certain points which were typically android.
I was a noob, I still consider myself a noob ( and I don’t think that’ll change) and coding for a company was a huge task. But I’ll tell you what a great advantage was, I had to make a phase 1 app which means I have to write the code from scratch which obliquely means I don’t have to read and understand shit loads of code that was previously written. As I said, I had done good homework on the services we are using both from Android and backend. But still unlike I thought, it was tough while implementing the code. I had to make sure the code was clean and readable because after I leave anyone trying to improve the app should be able to read and understand the code.
Just one app included a lot of stuff, networking, Json parsing, using Listener Service and much more stuff I didn’t have experience with.
I had to learn stuff first and then implement which double the time, double the effort and obviously double the rate slower work. But honestly, my boss was kind enough to give me all the time I need and finally, we got all the key points and work done. During Http POST request, I had a tough time. We knew an Android Developer who has great experience and he helped us send the data and thought a lot of ways to handle data, organize files and code efficiently.
Those lessons were something that penetrated in my mind and I remembered those points every time I coded.
The whole week, I felt very naive about myself. I had a lot of sessions with my boss, we sat together correcting code. During this course, he learned a little bit Android too :P. Every time I used to lose at a silly mistake but he was kind was to never lose his patience.
One week passed by and we were almost at the verge of completing our app. Every time a new data point popped up we edited it and studied its importance. Tough week for sure, but an informative week indeed.
Every time I went to my room I collected the points learned and read articles about it,
Lessons learned were humongous,
- Http Parsing(GET,POST,PUT)
- How to organize java files
- Code more efficiently
- Error Handling
- And more and more of Java and Oops
- Wake up without mother to wake you up
- Sharing(from clothes to beer with a room mate)
- Keep a count on expenses
Let’s see how the second week goes!!
Bhavna.
