Week 6 (July 15 - July 19)

Before starting my internship, the questions that I had were the difference between backend and frontend, what it means to be a software engineer, and if I would enjoy a career as a software engineer. From this internship, I learned that the front end is what the users interact with, and the back end is the logic that happen behind the scenes. I was also able to quickly figure out that I had the most experience with backend from the Berea College Computer Science courses and that I did not have a lot of knowledge in frontend at the beginning of the internship. The life of a software engineer in the real world would be very similar to my internship, except that there would probably be more strict deadlines because in this internship, we are given as much time as we need to learn as much as possible. I feel like I would enjoy a career like this internship for the most part since I enjoy researching about an issue that occurred in the application, figuring out why the issue occurred, and creating a solution for it. I really enjoy the entire process of trying to solve an issue because it forces me to research about things I never think about and also introduces me to new things about certain languages like Python and JavaScript. My main concerns in this field would be the work environment and the work norms since I would need to collaborate a lot with other programmers and would be given deadlines for projects, and if the team that I am with is not supportive or if the deadlines are unnecessarily strict, I would not enjoy it.

 

The knowledge that I utilized the most were from the courses Software Design and Implement because the logic and models for the CELTS program is written in python and Databases because we are working with a database. I think I utilized a lot of knowledge from the Databases class because our project in that class was basically creating something like the CELTS program. Each group was assigned a client and we had to communicate with our clients to decide how to design our database and what rules we need to create. Then we had to implement our design by creating logic and templates for the users to interact with. The difference between the class and this internship is that in Databases, we had to create something from scratch while the CELTS program was already created, and we are just continuing to build on it. Another difference is that we had a lot less time to work on our projects in the class, forcing us to rush a lot of implementations while in this internship, we have 40 hours each week to work on it, so time is not really a problem.

 

This internship helped me realize that I do enjoy the process that software engineers take to solve issues, make modifications, or add new features in an application. It also made me realize that I do not hate front end as much as I thought I would; I only did not enjoy at first because I did not have a  lot of experience in it. After solving various issues in the front end, like controlling the behavior of toggle buttons and displaying or hiding certain things on a page when users click on different buttons or areas of the code, I actually enjoy front end. I also think that debugging on the front end is a lot easier than debugging on the back end since we can see it visually on the page the majority of the times or see it in the web inspect. However, at the end of the day, I still do enjoy creating logic to make the application work more than designing something for users to interact with.

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