My first week as a software engineer intern at Teamcal Ai
As it is the Friday of my first week at Teamcal Ai as a software engineer intern I wanted to share my experience of how the first week went and what I did.
Day 1 (Tuesday, May 30th): Onboarding — I had the first meeting with everyone on the team. It was nice to introduce myself and get to know about them including what they have been working on. Because it is a remote internship I was worried that I might not be able to get to know other interns well but I could tell from this meeting that I could get along really well with them and it was nice to see their smiling faces and their passion for work. After having this short meeting, the CEO and I had the one on one meeting and he let me know very clearly about what the plan is for the next 10 days to get myself comfortable with the product, codebase, and team members. Having had this one on one meeting with him made me more confident in getting started, and reminded me about the goal I wanted to achieve through this internship.
Day 2 (Wednesday, May 31st): Setting up the environment — With my own understanding from reviewing the Teamcal Ai app just like a user, the CEO gave me a thorough walkthrough of the product features. After he showed me a demo on Teamcal Ai it cleared the confusion I had for some of the features I was yet to be familiar with. I asked him a couple more questions to really comprehend and consolidate my understanding of the product. Then I spent a few hours setting up GitHub, and the local environment for development. My first contribution was fixing 2 small bugs related to spelling errors and pushing them to GitHub. For the rest of the day, I reviewed the recommendations/impressions of Teamcal Ai which I will present the next day to team members.
Day 3 (Thursday, June 1st): Fixing more bugs! — I started fresh this morning in a very good mood. I opened my laptop, checked Jira, and Slack messages, and reached out to the CEO to update my progress. He assigned me a couple more bugs to fix to get me warmed up and get more comfortable working with the codebase. Thinking that one small mistake I make can directly impact the product made me feel a little nervous but first trying to understand how the code flows and why certain things are written that way really helped me fix bugs efficiently.
Day 4 (Friday yay, June 2nd): Work, Relax, and Communicate — I had one bug I could not finish fixing it entirely yesterday so I took my morning time figuring out the best way possible to keep the existing input validation while increasing a little bit more flexibility so it can accept more various forms of inputs. I was able to learn more in-depth about Codeigniter form validation, set rules, and regex. Today I also had a daily team meeting but rather than it was a typical stand-up meeting it was more so of casual and get-to-know-you-well meeting. It was fun spending time as a whole asking fun questions, outside of work, and being more personal together.
Summary: Even though it only has been 4 days since I joined the Teamcal Ai team, I am deeply enjoying my time here as an intern, learning from each other, and building more experience as a software engineer. I really appreciate that the CEO is very transparent with interns, friendly, always open to questions, and willing to help me when I get stuck on a problem. I am so excited to learn more, build more, communicate more, and grow together!
