My Internship in the SmartGym team
Introduction
Hi everyone, Xingjian here, a final year student from Singapore Management University majoring in Information Systems. Over the past few months, I have had the privilege of interning with GovTech Sensors & Internet of Thing’s (SIoT) Division, in the SmartGym team. It has been an eye-opening experience, being able to go through the entirety of the software development life cycle.
I mainly work on front end developments, for example, the web and mobile applications, and also implementing and updating back-end services to support the new features I am tasked to roll-out.
Work and team culture
I thoroughly enjoyed working with this team as I feel that our feedback and work are valued. As interns, we are treated no differently from the GovTechies and have the autonomy to suggest and implement new features.
There are new challenges and exciting developments happening every day, and you never really know what is about to come next. For example, you can be doing your work, but your team needs you for their data collection, and the next thing you know, you are facing the floor doing push-ups or running for a kilometre in jeans. Well, that’s the fun of it!
There was also once where I was randomly called as an extra for a filming happening in the office. Not forgetting to mention, because our work is directly being used by the public, there are also instances where I was “summoned” to fix live bugs discovered by the users. These are parts of my internship I’ll never forget.
Our job is not only limited to the office environment, being in the SIoT department, it is of no surprise that we are required to go on-site to deploy our sensors. This routinely happens every 3 weeks, where we would head down to the gyms to deploy our updates, and at the same time, check if everything is working accordingly.
As of writing, I am three months into this internship, and I have already participated in 2 pop-up events, helping to set up for the Digital For Life event and to man the booth for the Health District pop-up exhibition. These events were extremely insightful as we got to witness first-hand how our users would interact with our system, allowing us to take notes and make improvements after. From the events, we were also able to personally connect with the users, understanding their pain points and how our solution can benefit them. Through these interactions, we managed to directly gather feedback, allowing the team to further refine our solutions.
At GovTech, it isn’t all work and no play! Aside from the day-to-day work itself, we would also have monthly team lunches, weekly HIIT sessions organised by our team member, Joaquin, occasional bouldering sessions after work, and monthly meetings with our team lead, Chin Hiong, where we would have non-technical discussions about anything under the sun; from him trying to understand our working styles, to us asking him for advice, to anything about life in general.
Takeaways
(1) Delivering a product requires extensive considerations
The time spent in the SmartGym team was eye-opening and an enriching experience. Unlike school projects where we do not have to worry about the practicalities of the project. when working on the SmartGym applications, there are extensive considerations about the maintainability and scalability of the implementation. This requires higher-level thinking and it has forced me to grow as a developer. I have learnt and applied best practices throughout my time here. Knowing that the applications developed will be used by real users also motivates me to ensure that it is of a certain quality as well.
(2) Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone
It isn’t always fun and games, and there were many stressful moments as well. I remember coming in on the first day and after the ice-breaker activities, my peers and I were told to submit our first pull request by the feature freeze on the third day of our internship. Having no development experience with Dart and Flutter, I had to learn it, understand the codebase I was working with and implement the feature I was tasked to do. This leads me to my next take away, which is to not be afraid to get your hands dirty. Even though it was stressful, being able to overcome the challenge was rewarding.
An advice to prospective interns
Do apply early, be prepared to answer at least the basic interview questions and just be yourself. As mentioned previously, when you get the position, prepare to get your hands dirty as there will be a lot of learning and doing, as your work will be deployed and used.
Finally, when you do come into the office, do not be intimidated by the mess, as our team lead puts it, the mess and chaos (it is a lot better now) indicates that it is a maker’s space!
I had a great internship experience, and I hope you’ll have one too. Thank you SIoT team for making me feel at home and imparting so many valuable skills!
If you would like to intern at GovTech, do find out more about their internship programme at go.gov.sg/govtechinternship. All the best!
