starly dot dev

Internship Lessons

some lessons from my internships

these are things i found useful through my internships and are probably good guidelines for anyone doing one.

I'll be testing Nutshell out! When you see a link like :this, click on it to expand it.

  1. document, document, document

    • every day, i made a page to dump notes, which included things like:
      • running log of what i accomplished / meetings i went to (+ meeting notes)
      • notes on how to do something
        • eg: how to spin up a new server
      • musings on potential ways to accomplish something
        • eg: to build this pipeline, i could use x to connect to y server and send data to z
      • section for jotting down what you need to do the next day / future goals
      • anything i needed to copy paste
        • eg: list of server names
      • these logs are very helpful for your final presentation / project report
    • i also had pages for specific tools/languages so i could note down useful commands
      • eg: i made a page with useful clickhouse queries and docs i found myself referencing a lot
    • :example for a day

  2. set up expectations / goals and project timelines asap

    • understand why your project(s) is important
      • why / how is your project providing value? can you measure that? what does success look like?
    • find people that will benefit or have to change their workflow because of your project and talk to them (and follow up on their feedback!)
    • if you're struggling, set up a more granular timeline and ask what your mentor thinks to see if you're on the right track

  3. talk to people! set up coffee chats with anyone doing anything you find interesting

    • given a topic / area you want chat about, your manager / team members will help you find people to talk to if you aren't sure who
    • come with a list of questions you want to talk about; here's my list for coffee chats
    • similarly, if you hear about interesting projects during stand up, you can set up a quick meeting with your team member and have them run through it with you

  4. have understandable commits, code, and readme

    • people are looking at them and judging you based on it because these are the main things you are there to create
    • ask your mentor about how they style commits and comments
    • make everything you create as user friendly as possible
      • note down how to run your code, potential failures and how to remedy them
      • you will not be there to explain how anything works in three months

  5. read about the tools you're going to be using

    • if you're not sure where to find the best resources, ask for reading material and internal docs about tools and libraries
    • listen to talks about similar projects in other companies or how your team functions in other companies
    • do not spend too much time rabbit holing into tools or the codebase at the expense of doing things
    • look up style guides for languages you're using to learn best practices

  6. ask good questions

    • ask for lots of help if you need it! it's more productive to ask than spend an hour hunting online for an answer
    • make sure to google your question before you ask
      • if you didn't find anything useful, ask for help and mention what you discovered online
    • anything else i have to say has been said better by julia evans: (1) (2)

  7. if you find something annoying, see if you can quickly automate it

    • bash is your friend
    • if you can't do it quickly, ask your mentor if it's worthwhile to spend time automating it so other people can use your script

  8. socialize with other interns, go to intern events

    • at least there's free food

note: i have never done a swe internship. make of this what you will.

:x note1

hi!

:x notesExample

to do list:

things i did:

tomorrow:

copy paste graveyard:

:x conventional

basically, append types to your commit messages

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