What was your first internship experience like?
I did my first internship this summer at Xelpmoc, which is a company that provides technology and data science solutions for Indian companies.
I just completed my freshman year and never really worried about an internship after my first year. At the same time, I was exploring web development — especially, front-end and also doing mild competitive programming side by side. Our summer break had just started after semester exams and I was confused with what to do to utilise my summer break.
One of my friends informed me that he had applied for a Machine Learning role at Xelpmoc and it was also looking for front-end developers.
I had done a couple of web development projects as a freshman, had my website up and running on Github ,could write concise Javascript code and had a somehow decent grasp of Data structures and algorithms. So I brushed up my resume, updated my website and was ready for it. I had to fill a online form which would be used as my Internship application.
I was fortunate enough to be shortlisted for the interview and reported to their Kolkata Office for an interview one sunny day. The interview went good for me.
Initially, I was asked a lot about my development background- If I knew any JS frameworks — and some design questions. I was not able to satisfy him because I simply knew VanillaJS and had no prior experience with any JS frameworks.
I had already lost hope when he suddenly switched to DS. I was to check if 2 strings are anagrams of each other, had to reverse two numbers without using a temporary variable , and implement any graph traversal algorithm. The first 2 questions seemed too easy because I had just encountered them in my semester examination :) For the graph question, I coded a simple DFS(Depth First Search), which was not that difficult per se.
That was it! I received the joining email a few days later.
On a bit of research, I found that Xelp was a NSE listed company, had its IPO few months back and they were doing really great work. It had also acquired DataSutram, a startup that was founded by my college seniors few years back. It was a win-win for me. Plus, the stipend was cool :)
The internship started on a great note. I was assigned a really cool Front-End team of 3 members. The other two were seniors from my college and over the course, I learnt a lot from them.
I had to learn Angular- the robust JS framework, which would be the platform for the web app we were building and 2 data visualization charting libraries, namely Chart.js and D3.js. I had a week’s time to get comfortable with them. My co-interns were in their sophomore year and had already worked in React.js, hence it was mildly easier for them to grasp the concepts of components, templates, routing etc.
Anyways, I geared up and over the course of the month, I learnt how to work in a team. I learnt that teamwork was really essential and that co-interns and mentors were always ready to help you out- you just had to ask. I familiarised myself with a Linux environment — a vital step for development , and the cool Terminal commands.I also realised the importance and intensity of version control, Git and how it was one of the most important components of software development. We developed the web app on Gitlab.
We created an online charting tool, DataViz which was aimed at Data Scientists for exploratory data analysis. I worked extensively on D3.js to create custom interactive dynamic charts and a major chunk of the code I wrote was in TypeScript.
I had great fun. At lunch, I and my team experimented with various foods and the rest of the time, you would find me like this:
As the internship ended, our cool mentors gave us a farewell treat and some valuable motivation that we took with us.
For me, it was my first earning and I felt really happy and satisfied that my code would be used to ease people’s lives, even if by a small margin. I realised how much you could learn from your friends — I literally learned entire JS and Angular from my co-intern who was a ninja in web dev.
In the end, the feeling you get when your hard work credits money in your bank account is orgasmic :)
What I am upto now: Sabuj Jana | Personal Portfolio
Originally published at http://quora.com.
