Owen ‘19: Summer intern at Jackpine Technologies
When I first visited Jackpine Technologies before my internship started, I was nervous. The company develops software for the Department of Defense, so I thought the company would have a very strict atmosphere. When I got there, I was given my very first assignment:
Needless to say, I did very well on that assignment.
And when I came back on my first day of my internship, I was greeted with this, pinned to the fridge like a kindergartner’s first crayon scribble:
The company culture was nothing at all like what I’d imagined. I was listened to when I had input and was encouraged to ask questions, which I did a lot when I first started. I began my work by going through their site and getting used to how it worked, trying to break as many things as possible along the way to help uncover any potential bugs. Their website combines operating systems and software assets into usable packages for other software developers to make use of. The next day, I was assigned several “test cases” for QA, which meant going over a test of some kind I could execute on their quality assurance version of the site. For example, a simple one was “Make sure users can request a password reset” and a less simple one might be “As a standard user verify that a hollow system during deployment launch with ‘retain on error’ set to true is held back when queued before submitted.” Over the course of that first week I slowly went from not at all understanding what that second test case meant to completing it with ease.
After the first week, I got the hang of it and started to work on more complex test cases. Most of these involved using the command line interface (CLI), or Terminal, to verify which commands work and whether or not they do so with the proper syntax:
I’ve gone through about fifty to sixty test cases by now and learned a lot along the way. I’m just beginning to do other work, such as learning how to create software assets and code them in a program called Batch. For now, I barely know how to use it, but if it’s like anything else here, I’ll be glad I put in the time and effort into learning it. More on that in the next blog. I’m very grateful to have this opportunity where I’m learning so much!
