My First Front-end Development Internship in London
In this article, I will talk about what I did during my internship in YesWeStock. Devote to a startup as my first step into the industry was an interesting experience. This internship only lasted for three months, then I flew to my next web development internship in the Czech Republic for the whole summer, which was another priceless adventure journey.
About Yes We Stock
YesWeStock is a London based tech startup, founded in 2016. It is a user-focused, convenient and transparent community-based marketplace for people who would like to rent local storage or let their space.
Our office was in a co-working space name Camden Collective near London Euston station, I was told that there were more than 50 startups worked and waited for the coming pitch opportunities to become the next unicorn.
What I did
- Redesign the original logo, colour scheme, and the original website with Sketch.
- Converted Sketch into a hand-coded fully responsive website based on industry standard.
- Worked closely with a back-end developer to develop functional and aesthetic components.
- Fixed bugs and added features to the existing website to improve web functionalities.
Technologies used: HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, React, jQuery, Gulp and Git, Photoshop.
The colour scheme and the logo
The existing colour scheme was really bright and energetic, in order to strengthen the impression of professional, I redesigned the logo with different colour and atmosphere. In the end, we chose the one with the original colours pattern, green, red and yellow but in different saturation and brightness.
The colour scheme consists of:
- Green:
#3C9493 - Red:
#CF5052 - Yellow:
#FCC459
Redesigned the homepage
Actually, I got my internship offer by providing a proposal of a re-designed official homepage mockup, the original design was fine, but it could be better by slightly improving on the typography and colour scheme.
The colour scheme followed the colours of the logo, and typography used a thick font with round-edge originally to express the friendly tone. I was told to make it more modern and stylish, hence I chose Lane Narrow, a really thin font which is a perfect match of a contemporary option.
The homepage was drawn in Sketch and later built in HTML5, Flask template and React, and I used bulma, one of my favourite frameworks, as the main CSS framework, which works like a charm and was implemented in most of my projects. Highly recommend it!
Worked with a back-end developer
The main back-end developer was a friendly guy from Italy, we worked on the API features such as coupon implementation, he provided me with the API and I would build a component to integrate with it.
The whole web application was built by different developers and there were few comments only, this decreased the developing speed dramatically. Whenever I modified a component, I had to read the component file from top to bottom to know how it works exactly. I struggled with it, but it was also a lesson reminded myself again the importance of commenting.
Conclusion
Although during the internship, I worked part-time and that’s not a really long duration of an internship, I was still glad that our CEO got the chance to receive a big investment from China.
During the three months, I learnt a lot and had the chance to work in a start-up. For me, I would say the advantages of working in a start-up are:
- Have more impact, you have more chance to make a difference and everyone can hear your voice.
- Closer to other colleges, for example, I worked with the CEO most of the time apart from the back-end developer.
- It might be a horizontal organisation, which means you won’t feel like working for a boss, but working in a team with the same goal.
If you’re interested in working in a start-up, there are two websites I know provide focus on the opportunities for startups.
