My summer internship was awesome!!!

It’s been long, huh? Not my fault. Don’t give me that look yet. Relax and let’s talk! Shortly after my blog intro ( click here to read if you missed it ), I got preoccupied with my summer internship — a remarkable role in software engineering with Kehillah Global. Not to bore you with stuff you might not care about, but it was truly incredible. I liked my manager a lot (call it a crush, maybe 😂😂). There were daily virtual meetups, weekly demos and fun Fridays.

Put your shades on for some highlight reel. In this blog post, I share the new things I learned — Technical, Soft Skills and Books I read ( I mean books I couldn’t finish reading 😂😂). Feel free to skip to the parts that interest you.

TECHNICAL

Most of the technical stuff I learnt was from React. I will not go deep, but I will attach links you can follow to learn more if you are interested. Here we go!!!

• I got a reasonably easy starter project in the second week with a puzzling discovery that all of the methods of the endpoints of the API I was hitting were POST instead of their appropriate types – GET, DELETE, PUT etc. My confusion was adequately fixed with a response from these links. Follow the links to get a better view of why it was so.

(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29954037/why-is-an-options-request-sent-and-can-i-disable-it )

( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS#examples_of_access_control_scenarios)

I learnt about…

• Storybook for building react components – my favourite new skill (https://storybook.js.org/docs/react/get-started/introduction )
• Using static variables in react class-based components ( https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/understanding-static-in-javascript-10782149993)
• PropTypes to ensure validity when passing props into components (https://reactjs.org/docs/typechecking-with-proptypes.html) (https://www.npmjs.com/package/prop-types)
• Figma for UI/UX prototyping (I still suck at this though 😂😂 but will keep improving)
• Wrapper Components (https://www.akashmittal.com/wrapper-component-in-reactjs/)
• I encountered an annoying CSS “bug”. This link helped me solve it (https://dev.to/annlin/css-flicker-on-hover-5gj5)
• Using null coalescing with optional chaining (https://dev.to/wayne_gakuo/optional-chaining-nullish-coalescing-4g4l)
• Using inline CSS variables (https://css-tricks.com/a-complete-guide-to-custom-properties/)
• React Error Boundaries ( https://reactjs.org/docs/error-boundaries.html )

I will update this list later when I peruse my notebook (after I find it, lol 😒) Enjoy these for now. In addition, I learned about certain industry paradigms and best practices, which would make this post unnecessarily long.

The most impactful aspect for me was creating custom components. This blew off the complexity cover and design structure of React UI components library like Material-UI (yh I can build Material-UI from scratch now; you feel me???😂😂)

SOFT SKILLS

• My collaboration and communication skills significantly improved towards the end of my internship after a few mild bloopers in the beginning. On top of that was my bi-weekly meeting with my manager (stuttered in the beginning, got comfortable later )

• Presentations and Demos: Task demos were mostly on Tuesdays where you are required to take the team through what you have accomplished over the week. It helped

BOOKS

1. I read a large chunk of Atomic Habits — its an amazing book. You must read!!!
2. CODE : Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. I recommend this book for computer enthusiasts who are curious about the arcane parts of the computer
3. Clean Code (yh the book i barely read😒) – Give it a full read though. its very cool!!

Ummmmm as previously said, I will be back to update this article. Hope you learnt something new from this!!!!!!!

What’s more? I am beginning the semester as both the Google Developer Student Club Lead and TEDxAshesiUniversity Web Development Lead. Am I excited? No doubt absolutely YES!!!