Backend Developer Internship Adventure at Jotform
Hi I’m Ece. I’m a 4th year Computer Engineering student at MEF University. I will be sharing my internship experience with you in this article. I did this internship from 1 August to 12 September. I was taking a role as a backend developer intern for the inbox team, one of the core products of Jotform.
Why Jotform? What is Jotform ?
I wanted to experience working in a company where technology is at the forefront. In that sense, Jotform was a satisfying option for me. Jotform is a tool for creating custom online forms. Form creation is extremely simple and requires no coding through to its simple drag-drop user interface. There are different products for editing and customizing form data such as tables, pdf editor, report builder, mobile form app options and so on. Apart from the form creator, Jotform also offers products that help their users. The company has more than 16 million users today and has offices in Ankara, Izmir, Istanbul, San Francisco, London and Sydney.
A welcome kit was sent to me within the week I was approved for the internship. This gift made me wait excitedly for the start of the internship. It was motivating.🥳🥳
First Week of the Internship Adventure
In the first week of the internship, we attended many different presentations to get to know Jotform and its services. A warm atmosphere was created that allowed us to feel ourselves as part of the company as interns. In this process, the professionality of the HR team was remarkable. “The Intern Guide 2022” was created for interns. This guide completely explained the internship process in all details and included what needs to be done. It even included the setup of the environment required for the development process. In addition, the form app was prepared that contained forms containing requests that interns might need which were named as “Intern App 2022”. On the first day of the internship, we were given a bootcamp task. This task was to develop products using existing services to get to know Jotform products better. At the end of the week, our mentors and the team we work with were determined.
Next Weeks
In Jotform, there were independent teams that worked like a small company within the company. The team responsible for the Jotform inbox assigned me and my teammates as interns. As a backend developer intern, my mentor was the backend developer of the Marvel Team.
Details of the sent form can be viewed in the Jotform inbox. During the internship period, we were asked to develop a feature that allows the user to see the statistics of the answers in the form. This is done while examining a submission in the inbox of the form. Thus, the user would be able to access the report of the form immediately without changing the page. In addition to the requested feature, we have presented the selected question in the form to the user with a feature that can be compared with another question. This will enable the user to see the statistics of the answers. So we developed a feature that shows the user the statistics of the comparison between the two questions. It can be viewed as a quick reporter that can be accessed directly from the inbox.
Since the agile working principle was applied, we had a meeting with our mentors every 10.30 a.m. Thus, rapid progress was achieved by making quick decisions throughout the internship. In addition, one-to-one meetings with my mentor continued actively during the internship. It was possible to brainstorm with other mentors besides the mentor assigned to you. Additionally, co-piloting sessions were held on Zoom, in which company professionals did their work that day live. These sessions provided the opportunity to learn in an interactive way.
Development Processes
On the development side, we were working with a server on the AWS cloud platform. Inputs were sent from client to hosting with a secure shell. Jotform has created a new Restful API which is named as “intern-api” for interns to use while developing projects.
While developing, we try to follow best practice. Attention was paid to issues such as endpoint naming, matching with the right HTTP method, and naming the resources correctly. Pure PHP and MySQL are used in the backend. I preferred Visual Studio Code as an IDE. We have used our collaborative workspace with git version control. OOP logic and modular coding were used and MVC architectural model was implemented.
MVC model consists of 3 layers: model, view and controller. In a project, data access is organized in the model layer, the interface is organized in the view, and the internal processes are managed by the controller, which establishes the connection between the model and view. In the controller where the internal processes are managed, the endpoint response was sent according to the incoming request.
Monorepo was also created for NPM packages. Thus, we were able to easily connect the frontend and backend parts of our project.
Last Week
In the last week our project was mostly finished and we were making small corrections. We were also preparing for “demo day,” which is part of Jotform’s corporate culture.
Demo day is the day when the teams make a presentation about the projects they developed in that week. It starts every Friday at 11 a.m. The language of the presentations is English, just as the company correspondence language is English. We had an excellent demo day as a Jr. Marvel Team and our internship program came to the end.
Thank you all Jotformers for this amazing internship !
