Homegrown: my week learning development skills at Potato
Kim Le is a year 10 student at a school in North London, she joined the Potato studio in London this week to further her understanding of working as a developer.
What attracted you to working at Potato?
I’ve always been interested in Computer Science at school, especially with the programming side of things. Recently, a few students and I had a project with two university students where we developed and designed our own social media website (we were separated into three teams — Business, Front End and Backend). With that experience, I began to get more interested in the computer science field and in the working industry. Then, a student at my school had done work experience here at Potato and gave me insight on her experience and a typical working day as a developer, which overall attracted me to working at Potato.
What did you do during your work experience at Potato?
I worked on a project where I was tasked to design a music web app using Spotify’s APIs, SDKs and other developer tools. I focused on the HTML for a search result; for example, putting the different categories in a specific order (e.g. Track Name, Album Name, Artist & Duration) with the help of Matte and Michael (developers). I’ve also been learning more about HTML and CSS from online resources such as freeCodeCamp.
What has surprised you about working at a product development studio?
The flexibility of working hours and the amount of collaborative work that goes on has surprised me as I thought there would be strict hours and a lot more independent projects. However, you’re given the opportunity to change your work day hours and team working is extremely important as there are many tasks that each person has to work on to complete a whole project.
What is your biggest learning from your work experience here?
The most important thing I learnt is the importance of communication and that you can always learn something new all the time. The project I’ve worked on requires problem solving skills so when I was stuck and had no other option after researching on how to solve a specific problem, communicating with the other developers was very effective as we could talk to each other and solve that problem together. Through this, I was able to learn more about the things I thought I knew about and retain that knowledge.
Has this informed what you would like to do for your career? If so, how?
Definitely. Working at Potato has given me further insight on what it’s like to work in a product development studio, the skills needed and the team culture. The positive, relaxed atmosphere and flexibility of the work environment matches my ideal working environment and the collaborative work that takes place has inspired me to take on more projects outside with other students who have the same interests relating to computer science, which could benefit me in the future when finding a career linked to programming.
