End of an Internship, Beginning of a Career

My six-month engineering internship at One Door is winding to a close, and I am amazed at how much more comfortable I have become with the everyday process of being a developer in a workplace.  Git has been described as something that is "hard to learn but once you know it, hard to live without."  The ability to be working on a feature on one branch, then be able to (on the same machine) easily look at a different version of the code to help debug something is incredible.  The fact that developers can treat this as unremarkable is even more incredible.

I wish that I had kept up with this blog a little better while working, but I have been absorbed by what I am learning every day and what new tasks I have been given.  Working as part of a team has been amazing, and the best feeling is when you are taken off of one team and put on another specifically because they asked to work with you.  That's not to say I haven't made my share of "new developer mistakes," but there is no better time to make those mistakes and learn how to deal with them than during an internship.

What am I up to now?  Well, I have been working on learning the basics of Redux, so that I can add another tool to my Front-End developer tool-box.  I am working on fighting the instinct to stop learning something new and devote a little time to converting this blog from the Blogger platform onto a website of my own design, but I think I will leave that for a future weekend when I need a confidence boost with a task I know how to do.

At work I was given a page to work on that had a menu of options... which all did nothing.  I have been able to implement each option, and have worked with the UX team to design a set of steps for one feature that would work better for bigger clients who would have to wait every time the page loads.  Instead of allowing the page to re-load with the submission of each individual form, I have been challenging myself to implement things on the back end and then manipulate the page with jQuery.  Down the line making the page load quicker is definitely something I would want to focus on, but I have been directly told to let it go for now.

I'm looking to continue learning, and am still excited by all of the possibilities out there.