Peaks And Valleys
The struggle is real!
Struggle starts the moment we start professional communication!! One of the most valuable skills I'm learning in this internship is the ability to speak with people in a professional setting. Working in a professional setting for the first time can be difficult to get used to. But it is the best way to learn how to navigate the working world through real-life.
Learning Starts With Questioning!!
Initially, I was very hesitant to ask questions to my mentors, I thought they would judge me for asking such trivial questions. But I was totally wrong, they are very friendly and helpful. Whenever I get stuck in my work or I don't understand something, I immediately ask them and they are always there to help me out. This has happened to me many times when I came across some new words in the vocabulary but my mentors made sure I understood those terms and we also have a good discussion.
There are several vocabulary terms that I recently learned that I was unaware of before and during the internship application period. One of them was the term 'find bar' which is a browser component of Firefox (Use the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut. Click on the menu button , and then click Find). We need to type a search phrase into the find bar's field and Firefox will start highlighting instances of your search phrase as you type.
Another term was 'rebasing'. Rebasing is often used in open-source version control to move the predecessor of a commit to another more recent commit. When I was solving a bug, it took me a week and there were some changes made to the same file. When I updated my patch on phabricator, the patch was not mergeable due to some conflict. Now, to solve that merge, my mentor Emma suggested rebasing my commit to the latest commit on the central branch. I was unsure about what that means. Thankfully, she has also suggested to me the steps to achieve that. To further understand that, I explored various tutorials and what that means that what are the advantages of a rebase. After reading some of the articles, I understood that rebasing is done to ensure a clean merge with the working branch. I am very much impressed by the capabilities of version control systems like git and mercurial. I will continue to keep learning such terminologies which would help me in cleaning landing my patches in the future.
Working as an intern and completing imperative tasks for my company gave me confidence to believe in myself. The completion of these tasks and appreciation from my mentors created a sense of accomplishment or something that I took pride in :)
With that I conclude, Intern life can be tough as we only get a short period of time to make a lasting impression. However, its fun too.