Dear Applicant,

Your first step is complete. Clicking the link to this article where you will find the recipe for the most intense and in-depth learning experience you could ever wish for. That’s right — we’re introducing you to Nest Collective’s 6th Summer Internship. 🤩🎉

Here’s our offer: 2 whole months of working on a real project with a team of junior designers and software developers, fully integrated into Nest’s ecosystem of companies, mentorship, and training, complete with hours of fun activities. Just like last year, this will be a remote-friendly experience.

We know this year has been, by far, one of the most challenging in recent history. Everyone was forced to adapt and learn how to be apart from their families and friends. We’ve had to change too! And, like yourself, we’ve grown. Learn how! 👇

Internship Layout

The Dream Team ✨

It’s you + 2 to 4 other interns (we did the math and that’s 3 to 5 people in total 🧮). We’re looking for a proportionate distribution of designers and software developers, capable of building a web platform. The underlying project will remain a secret for the time being. 🤫

The Process 🚲

We try to keep it as true to life as possible. You will:

• Ideate and prototype an idea;
• Define requirements for the project;
• Design high and low fidelity mockups;
• Do user testing and research;
• Develop software;
• Review code, do quality assurance and test the product.

Here’s the plan:

Kick-off 🚀

• This is when you get to know the whereabouts of our office and the people who will work with you for the duration of your internship. First days are always challenging, so we’ll make sure to have some ice-breaker activities mixed in and probably some refreshments as well (think 🍻and 🍹);

Requirement Specification 🐐

• Ever heard of an MVP? This phase of the internship is where ideation and requirements gathering will take place, setting the scope of the project you will develop in the following weeks.

Development + Learning 🙇‍♂️

• It’s time to learn and to get to work. You can find more details about this stage in the Mentorship and Methodology sections of this blog post.

Final Presentation 🎉

• Your chance to shine. You’ll have the opportunity to share the team’s progress, process, and results with everyone in Nest Collective’s Ecosystem. We’ll put together a small party to celebrate the occasion (should this be possible, of course).

Sounds like something you’d do in a company, right? That’s the goal. Along the way, you’ll find challenges and opportunities to learn. This year we’re opting for a “learn as you go” methodology, adapting our workshops and learning sessions to meet our interns’ requirements. Learn more about this in the next section.

Mentorship 👩‍🏫

Nest Collective is currently in a loving relationship with 12 companies: there’s Assure Hedge, Bloco, Deemaze, Fucking Amazing, Fidizzi, GoodBarber, Grama, Pink Room, Psand, RedLight, SRG Software, and Versátil Contexto. To be fair, they’re all pretty great.

During the course of your internship, selected experts from these companies will be working closely with you and providing the required guidance and sponsorship to guarantee the success of your project. From Brand Sprints to Front End Development courses, Nest Collective’s companies will be there to help.

Methodology ✍️

We expect our team of interns to adopt agile working methodologies. With daily standups and weekly progress reports, you will be able to experience what it feels like to work on a modern tech company. On our end, besides all the available mentors, a person will be designated to provide overview and feedback to the team — think of this person as your project manager

When and where? 🧭

If you’ve been paying attention so far, you might already know the answer to this question:

• June 28th — August 27th, so just about 2 months;
• At Nest Collective’s Downtown Headquarters.

We will make sure to keep you updated on any changes to dates and location, keeping in mind all the safety precautions and necessary COVID-19 restrictions. Start and end dates will also be changed according to our interns’ availability.

Other important information ⚠️

Here’s what we expect from you: willingness to learn, ability to work as a team, good communication skills, and hard work. When we get the chance to speak over the phone or during an interview, these factors will also be taken into consideration.

Here’s what you can expect from us: mentoring and training, contact with new technologies and tools, monthly pocket money, and an amazing summer in Coimbra with full access to our office space and perks (like snacks, arcade games, and parties), should this be made possible.

Applications 📜

Pretty simple, really. The form will be open until the 21st of May and you can access it here: https://internship.nestcollective.co/

If you have any questions, reach out to us at internship@nestcollective.co.

Best regards,

The Nest Collective Team

Nest Collective Summer Internship ’21 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello again, buddies! This time the greetings are coming from the designers 💻✏️

After presenting the developer’s side of this project, we will show you all the design processes we went through, in order to achieve the desired result and accomplish our main goals.

Baixa — Visual Identity 🎨

Before we start talking about the visual identity created for this project, let’s remind you of the context of our platform.

The Baixa App aims to group information about the services that Coimbra’s downtown may offer. We want to show the location, history, and details of all points of interest.

To start, we focused on users’ needs. For that reason, we tried to keep in mind all the advice obtained during the Design Sprint week. We want the user to have easy access to all the information (s)he needs, to facilitate the trip through Coimbra’s downtown while promoting the return to repeat the experience. If we succeed, Coimbra’s downtown will get more visibility and new visitors.

After a retrospective, we wanted to find the best UI/UX solutions and make the app easy and enjoyable. We discussed possible solutions, performed sketches, researched features on existing platforms, and read several articles about the theme.

After outlining all the objectives, we started by creating a visual identity coherent with its values.

We made several proposals and tests until reaching the final image. These examples were discussed later on with everyone involved in the project so we could get more opinions to help us decide which path we should choose to follow. We focused on the Portuguese sidewalk, the typical “calçada” pavement, presented in Coimbra’s downtown, as the base concept for the visual proposal. With three shapes, color examples, and typography we reached the final visual identity.

After a couple experiences, we chose salmon because it brings dynamism and a positive spirit, something we wanted to keep present in the project. Combined with this color, we also chose variations of salmon, gray, and white for the necessary contrast. This color palette was used in the identity and later on the platform.

What about typography? We chose Teko because its narrow and straight lines remind us of the streets of Baixa.

Our permanent work partner — Figma 😎

Thinking about the platform structure with ideas coming from the Design Sprint, we started to develop wireframes in Figma. We chose it because it’s a stable platform that allows you to prototype easily and work simultaneously with other colleagues. As the design process evolved we got to know Figma better than before. It allowed us to 1, 2, and 3. It also allowed us to develop our skills and to try a bunch of different tools, which was very useful and enriching.

The wireframes sketch process helped us structure the screens and arrange the various sections.

After this phase, we created a Design System. In the first version, we developed all the components we needed to start our mockups: grid, color palette, typography and icons. As the mockups progressed, we were creating new components such as inputs, buttons, cards, images, and other important details.

This document was always being updated and improved during the project.

Moving on to the mockups, we split the desktop screens between me (Carolina) and João. So we could work at the same time on different tasks and then do a quick review on each other’s screens. At a later stage, João started helping developers on the frontend and I kept working on mockups so the platform development continued to flow. When I finished the desktop version it was time to think about and design the mobile version of the platform.

Iterating the mockups was a long journey because we realized that certain choices could be simpler and improved each day. For this reason, we always had small details to correct to reach a desired final result. Among the mentioned corrections, there were simple things like size, errors, spacing, and choices of UI/UX in general.

In all these stages, the daily support and experience of Rúben Silva and Andriana Peresta were essential to improve our work.

Frontend 💻

As aforementioned, after some work on high-fidelity mockups, João started helping developers on the frontend. It started as a code review process, to improve the project organization and promote HTML and CSS best practices.

Even though it’s a long and boring process, realizing what we should or shouldn’t do is always a learning process. The important thing is to learn how to solve these errors and learn practical and professional techniques.

After that, he started to develop pages with our friends (or not 😏) — developers.

Although it was his first time to use SASS, the adaptation went very well.

The learning process was guided by Rúben Silva, as well as the entire design monitoring and support throughout the project.

Happy conclusion 🤩

Throughout the internship, we learned design techniques and ways of working that we were not aware of until now. It is very useful for our personal and professional evolution. We realize that unforeseen and small errors appear and we learn to deal with them practically and professionally.

Another good experience was working with the developers. It is a very positive experience from discussing ideas to making decisions that helped us to achieve more practical results way faster. 🙏🏼

Although this year’s internship is about to end, we feel that we can continue for months working on the Baixa platform improving it and creating new features.

Design Process — Summer Internship 2020 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello there, fellow humans! 🧍🧍‍♀️

As we are coming to the end of this wonderful internship at Nest Collective, we want to talk a little bit about how we developed our project throughout the summer.

Our Project 🌟

Looking back at the problems we diagnosed in the Design Sprint we decided to create a web application with some information about the city downtown.

For this, the tech stack we used was Angular for the frontend and Ruby on Rails (RoR) for the backend (this was predefined). As none of the developers had experience with Angular and RoR, we had to learn more about it as we progressed. For the database, we chose PostgreSQL, as both of us had experience with it.

Our project has two components, as previously said: an API server (Backend) and a Web Client (Frontend). It follows a client-server model where the communication is done through request-response messaging.

The API follows the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern since Rails enforces it. As we are programming an API server, we have models, controllers but we don’t have views, we have serializers that format the data we then send to the Web Client.

Our Frontend is an SPA (Single Page Application). This means that our app dynamically rewrites the web page content instead of the default browser method of loading the entire new page.

The Web Client also follows a similar MVC pattern, where we have interfaces for specifying the models coming from the API, the services play the role of controllers, keeping the data every component uses and then the components as views, having small complexity and mostly showing the models.

The Backend 🗄️

To store a lot of data about the city downtown, we had to separate it and process it in a way we could allow quick searches. We created many entities, in a star-like schema, with the most important entity in the center. This entity had several relationships with other entities. This was also why we chose PostgreSQL, we thought it was the best technology to store our data, as we have many relations between our models.

Our API follows a RESTful convention and sends the data in the JSON format, to improve performance and data correctness, we used the gem JSON:API Serializer.

As we wanted to allow users to register, we used Google’s and Facebook’s login mechanism. For this, we had to use some Ruby gems like Devise, OmniAuth, and Devise Token Auth, as well as OmniAuth Google OAuth2 Strategy and OmniAuth Facebook.

This task took a little time and patience, as this combination is not well polished and few people had used it. But after some banging head against the wall, we succeeded! 👍

With Devise, we were able to have a authentication system which gives the users access to more features. Devise Token Auth provides a token-based authentication. This authentication method allowed us to easily authenticate the users, validate their authentication and manage their permissions. The tokens are provided by Omniauth which also gives us permission to access some users’ data like their name, email and profile picture. Devise Token Auth depends on Devise since it only adds a way to authenticate with tokens.

To allow uploading images, we used the gem Carrierwave, in cooperation with Amazon S3 Bucket, as with this service, Amazon provides an easy way to store data. Carrierwave enables file uploading and Amazon S3 Bucket file hosting.

We had the need for an admin dashboard that would help us manage our data. We got suggested Rails Admin and since it ticked all our needs, we decided to use it. This prevented us from spending more time developing a solution from scratch.

For testing, we used the FactoryBot Rails and Faker gems. FactoryBot allows the creation of various instances of a class with straightforward syntax. Faker provides an enormous collection of random text and images to improve our test data.

We tested our controllers’ functionality since our models are really simple and don’t have much complexity associated with and the controllers are what manage our business logic. We made our tests to make sure that our code works in all situations, thus testing its completeness.

Finally, to ensure that our code was maintainable, readable, and secure, we used RuboCop and Brakeman gems. RuboCop is a static code analyzer and code formatter that ensures that the community coding guidelines are followed. Brakeman is a static security analysis tool that checks for security vulnerabilities.

The Frontend 🌐

Since we had to use Angular for the Frontend, we had to learn more about TypeScript, as we had little to none experience.

For the routing, we used the Angular Router module since we used it in our training and because it is the standard.

We had the need to create custom services to support our components. They were useful to store some data that needed to be shared in multiple components, therefore making its manipulation easier. Besides these services, we created a special one for abstracting our API requests.

To support our data and taking advantage of Typescript’s strict and structural typing, we declared custom interfaces for our API Model data types so it would be easier to detect eventual bugs.

In our forms, we used the Angular Forms module. We decided to use the Reactive forms approach with the FormBuilder class since it provided an easy way to structure, modify and validate form’s data.

To ensure a correct transfer of data, we used an NPM module from RedLight Software, Denormalize JSON API. This module transforms the JSON API data into a simpler form, easier to work with.

For user authentication, we used an NPM module called Angular Token, as it is compatible with the Backend gem Devise Token Auth. This allowed us to get simple information from users, like their emails, names, and profile pictures, while keeping all the data secure.

To graphically depict Coimbra’s downtown we needed a map API, so we decided to use MapBox GL, since one of us developers had experience with it and it allowed us to progress quickly in this matter.

After some code reviews, we were introduced to Angular Barrels — a barrel is a way to roll-up exports from several modules into a single module — and started to use them, improving our imports and organization. We also organized our code to be easier to maintain, separating components and services into proper folders. We also separated these components into atoms and blocks. Atom components are simpler components that we reused in many pages. Block components are pages or more complex components.

To ensure the quality of our code, we made End-to-End tests with Cypress and used TSLint to analyze our code.

Pipelines ⚙️

Since we were running many tests to our code, whether it was on the backend or the frontend, we had them run automatically so that it would remind us to correct any problem we didn’t know we had. To do this, we had to configure our GitLab repository to run two pipelines, one to run the functionality tests and the linter to the Backend and another to run End-to-End tests and the code analysis to the Frontend.

After these pipelines, we also created one to deploy our code into production, as we are using Heroku. This allows us to, without concerns, have our project running on our hosting platform.

This internship, despite being the Covid-19 Limited Edition™️ 😷, was our opportunity to explore new technologies, learn how to work in a team and in an agile development process. We took this opportunity and tried our best to make a successful project and we think we might just have done it! 🙌

Thanks to Dinis Marques and Filipe Abreu for all the reviews and suggestions, it made our jobs much easier! 🙏

Watch out for our next post, the designers still have a word to say!

Development Process — Summer Internship 2020 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello earthlings,

After our introduction and letting you know more about our training week and our project, it’s time to talk about our Design Sprint. It was a week full of experiences and work, guided by Pedro Cioga🤓, where we learned more about the problem in hand and started thinking about possible solutions to solve it.

Despite being remote-first, we are all doing this internship in person, given that we live here. It helps create a good environment. Also, it is easier for us to communicate and exchange ideas. This is especially relevant during the Design Sprint, as it is easier to have feedback on our work. Yet, we have adopted all safety measures.

This sprint was divided in five days 📅: Understanding, Diverge, Converge, Prototype and Test.

So, let’s take a look at what we did day by day! 🤩

Understanding 📖

On the first day, we started with a small presentation of the problem to be addressed by Bernardo Patrão, our product owner. Then, we noted the facts and assumptions we had about Coimbra’s downtown. And finally, we elaborated questions that would later help us form our problem statement, to objectively identify the problem we want to solve.

This way we diagnosed problems related to the lack of information about what the city downtown has to offer and the lack of promotion of its services and historical heritage.

Then, we interviewed two Nesters, Miguel Antunes and Sérgio Santos, to create our Journey Map, based on our critical path. It was divided in 3 phases:

• Search
• Commute
• Enjoy

After analysing this path, we detailed the different emotions and thoughts the user might have while going to the downtown.

Diverge 💡

On the second day, we did two rounds of crazy 8’s: some really quick drawings, about 30 seconds each, where we started pouring our ideas into paper and not thinking too much about the details. After each round, we discussed what we drew and started having new ideas based on each other’s approach. With this exercise, we ended up having potential solutions to the problems we stated the day before.

Later that day, each one of us made two storyboards based on the ideas that came from the crazy 8’s, each describing a possible interaction in our journey map, divided in the three phases aforementioned. Then we made a silent critique and voted on the storyboard or approach we valued the most.

At the end of this long and hard working day, every single one drew wireframes of how we imagined the solution was going to look like. In the end, each one presented their approach and we made again a new voting round.

Converge 🗳️

On the third day, we took a look again at the problems we identified before, thinking about how we can test them and know if we solved them. Finally, we chose the ones we thought had higher priority. The output was that Coimbra’s downtown needs more innovation and variety in what it has to offer.

For each problem, we identified which alternatives already exist to solve them. This provided us some guidance to what we could improve further more.

In the afternoon we started sketching our prototype, followed by trying to find its problems and to improve it. At the end of the day we had a final sketch of our prototype.

Prototype ✏️

After the Diverge and Converge exercises and conclusions, we prepared one low-fidelity prototype, oriented to the solutions we decided to work on.

Simultaneously, we prepared a questionnaire to interview the people as they tested the prototype.

Our main goals with the questionnaire were:

• Validate our previous assumptions and problems with the person being interviewed
• Understand if (s)he could navigate through the app easily
• Get some feedback about the app and its future usability after the interviewee tested the prototype.

We then had help from Rafaela Ferro to do a dry run, where we found out some problems and had a quick idea of what the people might do or think.

Test 🖱️

On the last day of the week, we proceeded to test the prototype with five new interviewees. We found some positive and negative aspects of the prototype, with some new ideas and strong aspects we should focus our attention upon.

We had some positive reactions to the prototype, as most people said they would use the platform and it would have had value to their day-to-day routines.

What we’re doing now ⌛

We are now giving our first steps into the project, both design and development-wise.

The Design Sprint went from an exhausting week to a week full of great ideas and excellent foundations to start the project the best way possible! We got to know each other better as a team and worked together along all this week, sharing opinions and knowledge.

Stay tuned for the next episode of the adventures of these Nest Summer Interns Covid-19 Limited Edition™️ 😷!

Design Sprint — Summer Internship 2020 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are the new Nest Summer Interns Covid-19 Limited Edition™️ 😷.

The team 🦁🐼🐶🦉

2 Designers…

Starting with me, I’m Joao Gonçalves, a master’s degree student in Design & Multimedia at University of Coimbra and I’m from Bairrada 🐷. I love sports, especially Basketball, and I coach my hometown team Sangalhos DC. 🏀 At the end of the day you can always find me at a pub near you having a (small 😏) beer 🍻.

Carolina Martinho comes from the highest city in Portugal, Guarda ❄️and she is a master’s degree student in Design & Multimedia at University of Coimbra. She loves Italian food 🍝, swimming and making good plans with her friends. She has a phobia of cats but considers them beautiful animals 🐱😒. She’s a perfectionist and hopes to improve her skills with the help of her fantastic teammates.

…and 2 Developers

Daniel Gonçalves is a 3rd-year Information Systems and Computer Engineering 🖥️ student at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon. He loves listening to music, playing video games and sports, mainly football ⚽, tennis 🎾 and biking 🚴‍♂️. He is also in love with travel and exploring new cultures and new food ✈️🌍.

Hugo Gomes enrolled this year in Informatics Engineering at Coimbra Institute of Engineering 👨‍💻. A fun fact about him: he doesn’t have the sense of smell. For his hobbies, he likes listening to music, binge watching movies and series, and draw occasionally. He also likes interesting challenges and he sees this internship as one 😎.

Training week

In our first day we explored the Nest downtown building and were introduced to Nest history and its companies. We met a lot of people (they paid us lunch 😎), including who will guide us in this internship, Bernardo, “o Patrão”, that welcomed us the best way possible and gave us a little bit of information about the project — we were eager to know more about it.

With this pandemic 😷, we had to keep a safe social distance, but despite that, we ended up enjoying one another!

We then started to have some training sessions:

• Design Systems, Prototyping and UI/UX with Renato Vaz;
• HTML and CSS/SASS + CSS Grid with Rafaela Ferro;
• Introduction to Processes (Scrum) with Bernardo Patrão;
• Introduction to the Design Sprint with Pedro Cioga;
• Responsive Design with Rúben Silva;
• Ruby on Rails, Databases and ORM with Dinis Marques and Andre Caseiro;
• Angular with Filipe Abreu;

During these training sessions, we were introduced to many new things and we got to solidify our knowledge in others. Some were harder for the designers, like Ruby on Rails, Databases and ORM, and others for the developers, such as Design Systems, Prototyping and UI/UX. Also, both the Introduction to Processes and Introduction to the Design Sprint training sessions prepared us for the upcoming weeks. These training sessions made us feel ready to start the project 👌.

Our project

Initially, we were introduced to our summer project that was focused in Coimbra’s downtown. Our main challenge is: What can we build that will support Coimbra’s downtown and make it once again a center piece of its citizens daily life?

To learn what specific problems the downtown has, we inquired, through online questionnaires, multiple business owners and found out that they believe the support of local authorities is not enough, that there is a lack of innovation and that is missing a platform where everyone can know what the downtown has to offer.

We want to tackle these problems during the upcoming couple of months by giving back a new life to this big and historical community! 👐

Let’s get started! 😎 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Be part of a team of junior designers and software developers, mentored by experienced professionals, working on a real world project for ~2 months. This is our challenge for the Nest Collective Summer Internship 2020 and, on this 5th edition, we’ll be remote friendly. 👩‍💻🌍👨‍💻

So, are you looking for some hands-on work experience? Let’s go. 🥂

Not fully convinced yet? Read more about our incredible super mega internship below. ⬇️

The Internship

Team: We will select a team of 3 to 5 interns, composed by software developers and designers, to build a working software application to be used in the real world.

Mentors: Throughout the internship you’ll keep in touch with and receive close mentorship from them on different domains and technologies.Our mentors work in several of our companies — RedLight, Deemaze, Grama, Pink Room, Broadcom, Versátil Contexto, Goodbarber, Fidizzi, Psand, Sursumcorda and FAmazing. 👩‍🏫👩‍🎤👨‍🏫

Idea: The idea is secret and will only be shared during the internship. 🤫

Duration: ~2 months
Timeline: 1 July - 4 September (we may have to adjust the dates, but don’t worry! We’ll always take your availability into consideration if you’re selected).

Agenda: Our agenda may need to change due to things that go beyond our control and with the safety of all in mind. 😷 But here’s the line-up we’re preparing for your summer with us:

1. Kick-off. 🚀 An introduction, it’s your first contact with the people you’ll be working directly with, the rest of your team and our community. We’ll show you around, get you settled on your workspace and ensure you will be comfortable to work with us during the Summer.
2. Training. 🎓 We’ve prepared a set of training activities that will help you get prepared for the coming weeks. Each training will be lectured by some of our experts on that domain. You’ll see them a lot throughout the summer, so get to know them and take the best you can out of that!
3. Requirements specification. 🐣 During this initial period you’ll research, think and debate the problem in order to define a solution that you’ll develop during the following weeks. Requirements will be refined later on, but here you need to set the scope of the MVP.
4. Project Development. 🔥 You’re left with ~1.5 months that will be filled with knowledge and breakthroughs. You’ll have the full experience of working in software development with your own team. And, of course, each week ends with a showcase, in which you share the progress made throughout the week with everyone.
5. Final Presentation = A Party! 🍹🎉 By the end of the summer your project will be prepared to be launched and used in the real world. This calls for a celebration! 🍻

What we look for in our interns

• Willingness to learn while developing a software project
• Attention to detail
• Ability to work as a team
• Good communication skills
• Proactivity, resilience and critical spirit

What we would like you to learn

We are eager to challenge you to work in all phases of developing a digital project, including:

• Conception and prototyping of the idea
• Interviews with end users and other stakeholders
• Setup of a software project
• Design user interface and define user experience through low and high fidelity mockups
• Web and mobile development following state of the art best practices
• Code review, quality assurance and software testing

What we offer you

• A fulfilling experience working in software development and/or web design
• Mentoring and training by the Nest Collective team members working in some of the best Coimbra based tech companies
• Contact with new technologies and tools used by the best in the industry
• The opportunity to contribute with your vision to a digital project that will be developed during the summer
• A monthly pocket money
• An amazing summer in sunny Coimbra, with some perks such as: Arcade, disco, winesdays, sunsets on the terrace and other events to discover during your internship experience (if we return to the office meanwhile 🙏)

How to apply

You can apply via our Summer Internship Application Form, until May 22nd. Submit your application and enter the world of software development at Nest Collective! 🙌

Feel free to send your questions to internship@nestcollective.co.

We look forward to meeting you!

Read more about Nest Collective and the previous internships.

Nest Collective Summer Internship ’20 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello again fellow readers,

Our internship at Nest Collective is coming to a close, so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how Nestatini was developed over the course of the summer.

What is Nestatini?

Nestatini is a Nest internal management platform that gathers information about its companies, events and nesters. A typical user is able to view information regarding Nest’s companies and its members, search for something in particular, create events and share them on social media. You can read more about it on our previous blog post about the Design Sprint!

The back-end

Considering we picked up on last year’s internship project, we already had a tech stack defined. The back-end was built using Ruby on Rails and a query language called GraphQL. Due to our lack of experience dealing with Rails and GraphQL’s steep learning curve, the mentors decided it was best to strip down the GraphQL from the platform’s existing code and focus our efforts on learning and coding pure Rails. This meant we had to turn our back-end into a RESTful API that satisfied all the previous and current requirements.

Regarding our PostgreSQL database, while the backbone was there, it still needed a little polishing to fit the reviewed models. Rails’ Active Record Migrations helped a lot with editing the database schema, since it can generate all the corresponding SQL commands from simple Ruby code describing the intended changes.

An interesting challenge we faced was adding search filters to our server. These filters were applied to different attributes and across tables, meaning we had to build complex queries. As a way to simplify the querying process, we made use of Rails’ scope functionality.

We also implemented a simple permissions system that limited user’s access to certain operations like editing and deleting data he did not own.

To ease data exchange and maintain consistency, we thought it was best to serialize our objects. For this, we used the Fast Json API serializer due to its utility and efficiency.

The front-end

Despite the overhaul on the website style, we were able to reutilize many components from the existing project. This was one of the many advantages in using React as our front-end framework. On the other hand, we had little to no experience in React, which meant we had to continuously learn while building our app. We have our mentors to thank for making this process as smooth and painless as possible 😊

We tried to structure our project according to the best practices we were taught. With that in mind, we used React Router to help organize our website pages and create the best user flow possible.

One of the libraries we used was Formik, an intuitive and helpful tool. It handles the behind-the-scenes state of a form, making the submission and validation of data much easier and transparent.

One of our goals was to improve the way events were scheduled and shared. This led us to the idea of letting our users create event drafts on their Meetup groups through our platform. In order to provide this solution, we needed to work with the Meetup API. Thus, it was necessary to authenticate the user using OAuth 2.0 and ask him to give our app some permissions. Only then could we send GET and POST requests under the user’s credentials.

Our requests, both to our internal server and external APIs, were made with Ajax due to its simple and clean implementation, making it the most efficient way for us to build all requests.

Throughout the summer we had to make decisions based on what we thought was best for Nestatini. Our approach was to choose options that led to the best practices, performance and reusability of code. We wanted to ensure our work was solid. Nothing comes for free, and this approach meant we had to go through a thorough, time consuming review process to avoid deploying unpolished code.

Everything considered, this has been a great hands-on experience, which made us learn new technologies and methodologies, how to tackle problems as they come up and how to join our efforts as a team (this includes the designers) to get the job done!

Developing Nestatini was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s great to see you (again)!

After presenting our project and clarifying some decisions we’ve made, it’s time to talk about our design process.

This year was a little bit different from the usual because the project’s visual identity wasn’t created from scratch since it had already been initialized last summer. So we decided to take their work, give it a personal touch and simplifying functionalities and visual styles. Even though we didn’t have to develop a concept, it’s never really easy to redesign something that wasn’t made by us.

We started by creating mockups for the pages that we were going to develop, using the platform’s main colors that were chosen by last year’s interns.
From there we decided not to include the illustrations that were already on the platform to make our design more intuitive and minimalist.

As for typography, we kept the Rubik font but changed Archivo, because they’re very similar to each other and don’t create the contrast that we intended. We also decided to keep the original color palette and add some neutral colors to create more contrasts.

Figma is a never-ending journey

To better organize our tasks and workflow, we divided the designers into two “teams”: Maria and I were in charge of creating the mockups and only later worked on the HTML/CSS later, while Miguel focused on the frontend development the entire internship. Even though we divided the team, we kept helping each other and sharing opinions.

Creating the mockups seemed simple until we realized the number of details that we missed everyday. Simple things like spacing, incoherences and even some bad UI/UX decisions. We needed to reiterate each task a lot.

Obviously, our perfectionism was not our best friend. 👼🏽

First time using React and SASS

None of the designers had experience with React or SASS before, so it was a learning process for everyone. However the learning curve was gentle due to the workshops from the first week and the consistent help we had from the mentors, everytime we had any questions about the best way to create or adapt a component or even a new page.

Our solutions

The fact that we had to make several changes means that we had to look for various alternatives and solutions to our problems.

Working together allowed us to have open discussions and debates on various subjects, and throughout the decision-making process, the designers always tried to debate different approaches with the developers in order to understand their opinion.

This phase was revealing because we could see that working side by side with developers is super important for the project to move faster because it allows us to prevent issues early on the process.

We essentially learned that the reality of a project inside the company vs. the reality of what we are used to in college is quite different. All of this that was taught by our mentors contributed to the improvement of our technical skills. Moreover, this was a neat way to improve our patience and to experience how it feels like to work on a real-world project where a task is never really finished. 😜

Nestatini — Through the Design process was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s find out about our journey through the Design Sprint!

Hello again!

After introducing ourselves and letting you know a little bit more about each member of this year’s summer internship, we want to tell you about our experience with the Design Sprint! Everyone told us it would be the best week so let us prove that in a few paragraphs.

We were challenged to work on Nest’s internal management platform called Nestatini (which was born in last year’s internship) where members from Nest Collective’s companies can organize and visualize all the companies, co-workers and even events. This way it would be easier to keep up with everything that is going on. This is really useful not only for intern members of Nest but also for potential clients or literally anyone with an internet connection.

These days were probably the most important ones because a lot of ideas were born there, we got to know each other and discuss our own opinions.

It began with a meeting with the Product Owner, Miguel Antunes, who introduced us to the project and showed us the main problem statements, which we had to deal with and eventually solve. Every morning we would make a recap of the last day to keep everyone updated.

Initially there were four problem statements:

1. As a Nest member, it’s difficult for me to keep up with everything that is happening or being planned (events, meetings, new companies, etc.).
2. As a company partner, it’s difficult for me to consult, gather, export and share other company’s information with clients. Information such as their members, experience, tech areas, interests and portfolio.
3. As a Nest member, it’s difficult for me to gather all the information about Nest or even to share that information (companies, office location, and private/public events). I would like to easily access all this information and make it available to everyone.
4. As a new Nest member, I’m not aware of how Nest works and its rules. I would like to have access to a “handbook”, especially on my first day.

We ended up merging problem statements number 1and 3 because they circled around the topic of events and looked too similar. By merging them together, we could solve two problem statements with one single approach.

After analyzing the information, we had to identify what characteristics our users will have, so we created different personas to help define our target and choose real people to interview. We defined each persona by different characteristics, for example: by role (founder, worker, ex-worker, intern and client), by location (uptown, downtown and remote) and by working time (junior 0–3 years, intermediate 3–5 years and senior 5+ years). Our first big challenge was prioritizing the information and deciding which one we were going to use in this case. In the end, we’ve looked for Nest Collective members that matched the personas we created before and we interviewed them.

The interviews resulted in reports converging to problems that were very similar, like having some difficulties when it comes to identifying all the members or keeping up with all the events. Then we moved on to the “How Might We (HMW)" exercise and a more detailed list of problems from each problem statement in order to select the most important ones. In order to focus only on the important stuff, we had to discard a lot of problems that didn’t seem so urgent, prioritizing the product owner’s goal for this summer: centralize and organize all information about companies and events.

We ended up getting three HMW questions:

• How might we centralize events and ease the access to the event’s info?
• How might we, as clients, access to the company info (portfolio, core business, hard skills, resources)?
• How might we centralize general info about Nest (important Slack channels, passwords, office keys, pet policy)?

On the third day we had to put our creativity to the test. We started by working on critical paths and user flows in order to better understand the main problems that we selected from problem statements, and start to grasp possible solutions.

Then we used our drawing skills and moved to the four-step sketches based on some quick research, notes, doodles and finally some crazy 8’s. What are the crazy 8's? Those are really quick sketches (1 minute per sketch, to be exact). The main goal is to think really fast and not waste time on details. In the end, we discussed all the ideas, like we always do, and tried to understand what features are most needed to implement on the platform.

During those days we met again with the Product Owner to clarify some questions and approve our decisions. Right before the interviews, we decided to merge two problem statements related to events and companies that were very similar to us, so clearly we needed the sign-off from the Product Owner to proceed with that change.

The end of the week was getting closer and it was time to decide our wireframes, so we created a heatmap and voted to choose which solutions were more interesting. After that, we made a storyboard for each situation to find problems on the user journey. At the end of the day, we had to discard the Handbook with rules and extra information about Nest, so we could focus on the companies, members and events in order to get better results (at least we thought so) instead of planning a lot of tasks and risking not finishing them all.

Eventually, we had to split the team so dzainers could prototype high-quality mockups while developers were creating a system context diagram and user stories. After that, it was already time to move on to product validation. We ended up investing more time than expected to make all the changes we wanted. After all those tests, we analyzed the problems and found solutions to better organize everything we want to share, like lists of events and companies, with all the information that might be necessary. Members are also allowed to create events easily and if you’re a founder, you can create your own company’s page.

We’re now building a platform with different options for Nest members. There you will be able to see all the companies, members and planned events. Nest members will have some extra options like company creation (if you’re the founder) and create/edit events. We couldn’t forget our visitors so we are also planning to improve Nest’s website, so even if you’re not a member, you can still access the company’s public information, members and public events.

That’s it for the Design Sprint. It took a lot of work but it was also very fun and we got the chance to work as a team. It was really challenging because there was a lot of information so we had to discuss different opinions and make important decisions that will affect our path in many ways. But in the end, it taught us new ways to solve problems, listen to/accept other opinions and also defeat our point of view.

Thank you, mentors!

Design Sprint — Summer Internship 2019 was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello World. This is your Summer Internship’19 Team speaking.

This week we’ve been tagging along with the Nest Collective folks. We began our Summer Internship and want to tell about this start of a new journey.

The team

This year, our team is formed by three amazing designers and three outstanding developers. 😎

Starting with me, I’m Maria Moreira. I study Design & Multimedia at the University of Coimbra. I am an extrovert girl and I always like to give my opinion and try to make a difference. I moved to Coimbra three years ago and it was great, it changed me on a personal and professional level. With this internship, I hope to continue to grow and even show my skills as a chef (since I’m the best cook in our department). 👩‍🍳

Miguel Vasconcelos is also a Design & Multimedia student, also enjoys cooking and eating pasta every day and making funny faces when a camera is around him. 🍝

Andriana Peresta is taking her master's degree in Design & Multimedia at the University of Coimbra. She is obsessed with dogs and genuinely wants to have at least 7 of them when she gets her own place. She considers herself a perfectionist and says that it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Last but not least we have the developers.

Andre Caseiro, he’s a 17-year-old 🔞, he just finished high school in a programming course and was previously doing an internship with Redlight Software. Oh and likes videogames.

Luis Silva is a 1st-year Informatics Engineering student at the University of Coimbra. He loves snowboarding and listening to music.

Diogo Ferrer is a 2nd-year Informatics Engineering student at the University of Coimbra. He’s always looking for new and challenging stuff to learn. As for hobbies, he likes playing classical music, reading and playing some videogames.

We got everything to make it work. 😅

Day zero

We started by attending a presentation from all Nest Collective companies. We met many Nest Collective co-workers and we were told how things would work during the summer.

We went on a tour of the uptown offices and finished the day in the best way: we had a sunset on Nest’s enviable rooftop balcony with a panoramic view of Coimbra accompanied by @thelunarsouls, with live music, tasty snacks, cold beer, and fresh sangria.

Training week

Let’s move on to the first week, where our attention was directed to lots of training courses designed especially for us by our mentors. These mentors, who belong to different Nest companies, will help and support us throughout the product we are building.

The trainings approached several topics, such as HTML, SASS + CSS Grid, Ruby on Rails, Data Bases & ORM, UI/UX, Responsive Design, Processes, Design Systems and Prototyping, and finally, JavaScript + React. As you can see, it was a diverse multitude of topics. This way we can start the internship’s project with good foundations.

Designers and developers, everyone learned a little bit of everything. It was pointed out that being knowledgeable of someone else’s work and understanding it is beneficial for both parties. And yes, time is very short, but a big effort is being made so we can learn as much as possible. Besides all this, our mentors were super nice by providing us with the presentations, guides and resources that they use themselves. (Thank you for that. 🤗)

We were knees deep in learning, so when we took the time to see what day it was, it was Friday already and the training week was over.

Look forward to more news and see you soon! 😎

Let’s begin. was originally published in Nest Collective Writing Wall on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.