Things I learned from my first full-time internship
My first full-time internship as an Associate Software Engineering Intern at Osmosys Software Solutions began on July 2022 and this 5 months' experience has been nothing short of extraordinary. I gained exposure, learned many new skills, participated in active discussions and acquired invaluable industry experience.
Here is my internship experience summarized in a few words.
Work from home
Things are indeed different when you are working from home, especially if it is your first time working in a professional setting. I discovered that communicating through ‘messages’ can cause minute but important details to be left out, which can create inconsistencies.
For example — In a mock UI, a button at the top right of a card component can mean ‘a button within the card and placed at its top-right with some margins’ or ‘a button floating outside the card, situated at its top-right’ (inspired by a real-life incident).
So, proper communication is important
Effective and efficient communication is a necessity for quality and timely task submissions and overall productivity. Practices like collecting and clarifying any doubts you have, asking questions and discussing important things in meetings can be helpful. It is crucial to learn how to include all the necessary details and address all issues without making the text too lengthy.
Also, people appreciate the use of certain emojis. We can add emojis to short messages to build a connection with the team and add an appreciative or considerate tone to the text 👍.
Everyone needs help. I did too, maybe even a lot of it at first. For that, building and maintaining a good relationship with my team was essential. Luckily for me, everyone at Osmosys has been extremely warm and approachable. Working with the people at osmosys has been absolutely amazing.
Technical skills and learning
Apart from interpersonal skills, I gained a ton of technical knowledge. I got to build mock UIs and develop them in the Ionic framework, research new features and their implementation, learn industry-level coding practices, take part in UI design decision-making, collaborate with my team on GitLab and do comprehensive bug testing.
During the first few weeks, I received training in HTML and CSS for which I worked on various assignments and had to complete two Udemy courses — ‘JavaScript — The Complete Guide 2022 (Beginner + Advanced)’ and ‘Build Responsive Real-World Websites with HTML and CSS’ of 52 hours and 38 hours respectively. The practice assignments and dummy projects gave me an insight into these techs and their syntax.
In the second month, I got started with Angular.js training and built a dummy E-commerce website, A library application and a weather and location application.
Then the wait was finally over and I was assigned with the projects, ‘Incident Reporter 365’ and ‘VetsOnCloud’.
Incident Reporter 365
My first task on IR365 was getting through the portal and the app and getting to know how various features of the project worked.
Soon I was tasked to work on making UI changes like changing page styles, adjusting margins and padding to improve user visibility and enhancing the overall UI.
This required me to apply all my frontend knowledge and scour the .css and .html files.
My everyday tasks for IR365 included:
- Building and updating UIs in Angular, in VS Code
- Working on template-driven forms using NgModel, structural directives and adding validations to forms in the IR Angular portal
- Creating angular services, observables and subscriptions
- Integration of UI features with the backend APIs
- Bug-testing, bug fixing and communicating issues to the respective team members responsible
- Working with google maps, google-maps polygon API and LatLng Bounds for portal-related features
The tasks that excited me the most were ‘Deeplinking’ and ‘Interceptors’ as they challenged me to learn new things and also provided insight into how real-world applications work.
VetsOnCloud
The project VetsOnCloud required me to actively participate in the UI design decision-making process, understand the decision-making workflow and discuss with the team in adopting best UI practices aligning with the new and existing users’ interests. Then my task was to create UI mock-ups, flows and the final prototypes on Figma using the Ionic components material UI kit.
For the project, I was expected to go through the provided ionic documentation and its components. Then the team distributed the work and began with the development of the UIs in the VOC ionic application.
Under the guidance of my team lead, with the support of my team and interning altogether at Osmosys I have acquired valuable skills and grown as a frontend developer. I am grateful for this amazing opportunity and look forward to all the learning and enlightening experience.
Thank you for reading!