Ivo Ilić, Developer Intern at Firstborn
New York City
I think Firstborn chose me for this internship because of my educational background, which is a combination of traditional classes and self-taught knowledge. The ability to teach yourself is super important in web, because everything is constantly changing, and you need to be able to catch up with new technologies quickly.
While at Firstborn, I’ve gotten to work on both internal and client projects. Mostly, I’ve been working on an e-commerce site using SCSS, Preact, and Liquid. It’s a pretty extensive project and right off the bat I got thrown in the deep-end to work on the header (which appears on every page of the site 🙃). One quick project I got to work on was an internal sprint for “World Emoji Day.” Firstborn created a custom slack emoji pack to represent agency life, and I built the one-page microsite. The page was a nice challenge because I got to use what I’d learned at the internship already to complete a project with a very short deadline.
The most challenging thing I’ve had to do at Firstborn is refactor my own code. Before this internship I mostly programmed stuff that only I was going to see or use. As a consequence, I rarely went back and edited my work as long as it functioned. Even now that I understand the importance of going back and refactoring my work, it’s still tempting to jump to the next problem.
The best thing about my internship has been the detailed and thoughtful feedback I’ve received from everyone who I’ve worked with. It’s amazing how much my abilities have improved with the proper feedback and encouragement. That goes back to the other best thing about Firstborn: the people. Everyone at Firstborn has been quick to help, teach, and treat me like an integral part of the team.
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from my internship so far is the significance of writing code that doesn’t just function, but functions efficiently, is easy to maintain, and easy to scale. Having to work with peers on a project that is large and constantly changing makes this a necessity. Working by myself on small projects would never have pushed me to write code that way.
My advice to future interns would be: Don’t be afraid ask for help when you need it and make suggestions when you think of an idea. Also, taking notes when someone mentions something you don’t know is super helpful. Anytime someone at Firstborn mentions a concept or library I don’t know about I write it down and look it up when I have a minute.
🎧 Hear more about Ivo’s experience at Firstborn in his We Are Next Podcast Minisode.
- Connect with Ivo via Twitter, Instagram, and his website.
- See more from Firstborn on Twitter and firstborn.com.
Huge thank you to Ivo and Firstborn for being part of Intern Fieldnotes, Vol. 1! For more insight and advice from summer interns at agencies all over the country, check out the full series.
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