It’s the last week, 14 of 14 completed! It is cause for celebration, but is bitter sweet. I am the last summer intern in my area, and it has been very quiet on this last day. Not only that, but as time always goes by, I am leaving a part of myself here. I spent hundreds of hours here working, and socializing. Time marches on, and so must I. I am excited to go back to college and learn more. That does not take anything away from this experience, I am simply eager to dive back into studies, and research.
I sincerely hoped you enjoyed reading my blog, and sharing in the experience. This blog has certainly helped me collect my thoughts and internalize what I have learned. If you are toying around with the idea to writing a blog, or keeping a journal, I certainly suggest you do so.
What I did
Not a whole lot. I’ve updated documentation, including a UML Activity diagram for the test that I renovated. In doing so I discovered in an inefficiency in the test flow, so therefore I went ahead and fixed that, pushing out my last pull request. Essentially most of the time has been spent wrapping things up.
TIL
8/21/2017
Software engineering while tired does not go very well. I wrote some pretty sloppy code and forgot basic stuff, like getting rid of unused imports. At least these small errors got caught during code review. While they did not make it to the code base, they should not have been avoided in the first place. I mostly attribute it to being abnormally tired today.
8/22/2017
Today I went to lunch with my manager. One of the topics of discussion was about how project management and software engineering was taught in schools. At URI I was thrown into a group, and we were told to come up with a project using a few guidelines. That method was going at it cold turkey. As a group we figured it out as we went along. At the internship, there was a much more directed approach. I tagged along to meeting and asked questions, eventually I started participating too. This is the slowly but surely method. Both ways taught me more about how projects were planned, executed, and reported in the real world.
8/23/2017
After sitting down with my direct supervisor Brad, I learned some more things about the software engineer industry, and I gained some insight on my new goals. Brad suggested that I feel out different positions and areas in the industry. He eventually was pushed into a management role at Dell, and had enjoyed it ever since. Another recommendation that he had was that if I did not like a job, switch as soon as possible, staying will usually make it worse. I also learned some more about my own goals. I decided that my next goal is to try out a job in a new language, a job that is closer to system hardware, and one that works more abstractly with math and system design. These are not mutually exclusive.
8/24/2017
The days in which I have work to do all day are much better than the days in which I do not have much work to do. Of course there is a balance to it all. If I was given too much work, that would be stressful. I can easily get lost in a problem, and get caught up thinking about better ways to do things that hours fly by. Whereas when I have less work to do, or a blocking issue is present, time seems to move much slower.
8/25/2017
Over the course of the internship I have kept asking myself, do I like this line of work? The truth is, that as long as I have an interesting problem to solve, I’ll most likely enjoy the work. I feel as though it is not so much the actual coding, or products that determines my happiness, but the people I work with, and the environment around me. I had an excellent summer spending time with the other interns and full time coworkers. I know that I will continue finding my way solving problems and learning neat things. I should always remember to be mindful of people and places around me. I would like to thank the people I’ve worked with this summer for an amazing experience.
Personal
My friend Matt has come over to play a DotA 2 tournament final. He is a professional player, and did in fact win the tournament. With that win he is now being drafted onto Sunshine gaming, where he will be a salaried player. I find it extremely interesting that eSports has taken off to the point where it is possible to earn a living becoming a player. In other news school is just a little over a week away, and I am getting ready to move in, and be a club officer in the computer science interest group.