My First Internship!
· Fullstack, Web Dev, Vue, Nuxt, .NET, Internship
Recently, I completed my first ever internship at Oliver’s Labels in North York, Ontario, Canada.
I don’t have much to say, except for that it was a great learning experience!
I went in not knowing modern web development (with frontend frameworks, backend APIs, and databases) except for a little bit of React Native and Firebase, and I left the company learning and understanding so much more! My work was with an internal website used to manage customer orders. I was a full-stack developer, working on ther frontend which used Vue, Typescript, SCSS, and Bootstrap, as well as ther ASP.NET Core backend API paired with a SQL database.
I did many tasks, including bug fixes, refactoring code for better usability/readability, and added feature parity to our new internal website (nicknamed V4) based on pre-existing functionality in the older system (nicknamed V3) that was yet to be implemented.
It was truly shocking and amazing that my boss let me ship completely new features to production, including web pages to access our Amazon Listings, customer and fundraiser accounts, webpages and API endpoints to view internal product codes and specifications.
Most shockingly (and visibly) of them all, I applied a new theme to our frontend, revamping its basic look to a modern style, while also implementing responsive designs across the entire website allowing for mobile screens to work (which was previously broken for many pages), and an accessibility option to increase the text size across the entire website (as requested by a fellow coworker).
I was mostly working independently while having regular meetings with my boss to report progress and ask for their opinion/advice. It was a smaller company, so the only active software developers were only me and my boss (who ran the company).
Towards the last 4 weeks of my internship, I already had a full and comprehensive understanding of the codebase and was now proficient in Vue (used in our frontend) and was much more comfortable with ASP.NET Core (used in our backend).
In these last weeks, I talked to most of the senior employees who used our internal website, and we discussed the site’s usability, issues, bug fixes, and features. This was a critical experience as I was able to directly communicate with users on how they used the site, and how they would want to use the site, and it started to shift my mindset from ‘how do I want to implement this [as a developer] to ‘how am I going to USE this as a customer’.
I truly want to thank Sheharzad Arshad, creative director at Oliver’s Labels, for connecting me with the company and especially Felix Shterenfeld, my boss, for providing me the opportunity to learn and work with the company even as a complete beginner. Working with the codebase and having regular meetings really improved my understanding of modern coding techniques and practices. It was a fun and useful experience!
