My DevCareer Internship
Three Months have passed since I first indicated interest under a tweet made by HackSultan. He is a popular Nigerian tech enthusiast and developer advocate and He had come up with the idea to provide upcoming junior developers with Internet Subscriptions and paid access to Progate (An online platform for learning programming) for Three Months. I indicated interest to be part of the Internship and I was part of the 100 participants selected.
We were asked to pick our tracks, I went for Web Development with Node Js. Based on our tracks, we were added to slack channels and provided with mentors and access to the learning materials. In about 2–3 days, Our phones were recharged with Internet data for the first month and subsequently, for other months.
I immediately dived into learning. My Progate track began with the basics of web development, i.e HTML, and CSS. It progressed to Javascript and Then Node JS( Express). Every step of learning was Interesting and Fun-Filled. I especially loved the Learning Interface made available by Progate. We had weekly progress reports on the channel, and by the end of the first month, We were assigned our first task.
Given beautiful Figma designs, we were asked to reproduce these designs as functional and responsive web pages. At first, I wondered How I could get the design into a web page. It looked quite complicated to me. We were told that we had 3–5 days to complete the design. I spent a lot of nights being awake and working on my project. By the time I submitted, I was so proud of myself and what I had been able to do.
Each Intern had their code reviewed by the very dedicated and always available Mentor, our go-to person all through the course of the program, Okoye Bartholomew Chidi.
Here is the link to my first task
Subsequently, we were placed into teams where we were tasked with building various components of a massive website. I worked as a backend developer using node js for my team’s task. During this process, I learned how to create APIs with JWT Authentications, I had hands-on experience with using MongoDB. It was interesting collaborating with other developers in the Internship.
The third month, July had me in yet another team. My team was provided with the style guide and images of two websites, which we were asked to design and develop together. Our coding needed to include a method called “Peer-Programming”. We were introduced to methods of collaborating in real-time such as the Visual Studio Live Share, Google Meet, and The Live Share Server. It was fun, educating, and fulfilling.
At the end of the peer-programming tasks, A mentor reviewed our code, gave insights and corrections, and tips to a more optimized programming technique.
Below is a link to one of the tasks for the third month.
Apart from learning, We had many fun game nights on the channel. Interns could interact, play games, and stand a chance to win prizes. It felt like a family of devs who all wanted to grow and have fun too.
As the program draws to an end, I am grateful for the opportunity I was given, the connections I have made and the knowledge I have acquired.
In the space of three months, my skills have grown beyond what I imagined before I began. I am currently on the path to becoming one of the best Software Engineers to walk the earth, and I am grateful to Devcareer for adding chapters to this story. I will miss many bants and random conversations. It is my desire to see that the Slack channel remains open and accessible to us.
Special appreciation goes to the sponsors of the program, who financed an amazing idea, the pioneers of DevCareer, the Mentors who freely gave their time, and the Progate platform.
Its upwards only from now henceforth.
