Software Dev. at Berea College

  My experience with my internship colleagues definitely deepened my understanding of connecting the front-end development to the back-end development. Coming from a background where I do not have much front-end experience, such as working with JavaScript or HTML, the issue that I am working on right now was very confusing for me. My last partner, however, knew a lot about front end and was able to explain to me how Bootstrap and Jinja are used in the HTML file to design the page that users will see. He also explained about how JavaScript is used to control the behavior of the page and how to use it to collect the user inputs on the page so that we can store and further manipulate the data. This was a huge learning opportunity for me because for the first time, I was able to clearly see the difference between front end and back end, and why the logic and controller are needed so that data given by users matches the formats in the database and data given back to users are displayed ...

A past experience that I found especially useful in this internship is the Databases course that I took during spring 2024. In that course, we had to collaborate with real clients who wanted a database system and we had to build it using Flask, which is similar to what we are doing in our internship with the CELTS program. The main difference is that CELTS is already established and has the major parts already working, meaning we are just maintaining and enhancing it whereas in the database class, we had to design it by creating business rules, entities and their attributes, assigning cardinalities, deciding the relationships between each entity , and how the website itself will look like. Having prior knowledge about databases and how to design one using business rules, cardinalities, and entity relationship diagrams helped, especially with the current issue that I am working on with my partner, which involves having to track the relationship that one of the tables in the model has ...

We started our first day with general good practices at work regarding efficiency, ergonomics, and taking breaks. It is important that I choose a good keyboard that does not hurt my hands and wrists over time, that I make sure the top of the computer screen is at my eye level to avoid neck pain, and that I choose a mouse that will help me perform tasks efficiently and quickly. Although the advice to maintain a good posture when sitting for extended periods and to take breaks is something that is commonly known, I never experienced it until on the first day. Sitting for most of the time during the 8-hour shift in front of the screen strained my eyes, made my mind foggy, and left me exhausted at the end of the day. I also felt like the little breaks that I would take in between actually helped me a lot in reorienting my thoughts and making me feel more awake. As the week progressed and we were assigned issues inside the CELTS program, we learned about the flow of the system used in the...