Table of contents
Introduction
Hey there, it's been a while. How have you been?
Well, on my end, my Outreachy internship at Public Lab is slowly coming to an end and I am having a lot of mixed feelings. It has been one of the best experiences I've had in my entire life.
Today I would be focusing on some skills I picked up during my internship and I believe they would stick with me for the rest of my career.
The Gist
By the way, this was inspired by Sage Sharp, they urged me to write about it, so if you do find this useful, thank them.
Now, I'd get right to it, in the project I'm working on (Leaflet.DistortableImage (LDI) aka Mapknitter Lite) we get to work on what seemed like a lot of tasks to improve LDI.
That being said, I am used to being assigned tasks, being told what to do, how exactly to do it, and basically just being a cog in the big machine.
In my time at Public Lab, my awesome mentors never did this, like never ever, instead, they let my co-intern and I select our tasks which fostered some sort of responsibility in my opinion. When I picked a task myself, I get this sense of responsibility, knowing I was not forced to take up the task it gave my self-discipline(which was fostered by the fact that this internship is remote) a boost to get it done in time and to the best of my ability.
Another thing is what I will call guided learning, almost everyone has experienced this (hopefully) in other aspects of life, myself included. But this feels different, why? well because it's in technical skill development. So I hit a wall in one of my tasks after some googling I resolved to contact my mentors. My mentors guided me to the solution, by sending me links to articles and docs that I believe they knew would help to finish my task, this nurtured my curiosity as an engineer.
My co-intern and I got to be part of that inner circle where the program design was decided, and why it is designed a certain way among other things, and this made me see the bigger picture.
We also got to take into consideration other aspects of writing code that you don't just pick up anywhere, aspects like code readability, maintainability, and many more.
Conclusion
I could go on and on about the various intrapersonal skills I learned as an intern, but I'd like to end with this; There's so much more to being a software engineer than technical skills, opensource is a good place to start fostering those skills. I can proudly tell you from this experience I will be a great software engineer and open-source contributor. You can too if you learn these intangible skills.
Look forward to my next article on what I learned from decades of software engineering and open-source contribution by having 12+ informal chats.
Do like, comment, and share if you found this useful or have a contrary opinion. Thank you!!