We’re looking forward to welcoming our summer 2018 interns in a few months’ time. Last summer, Sam gave up 9 weeks of his summer break to come to Bristol and intern with us. Here is what he thought of the developer internship.
What attracted you to Ghyston?
During my first year studying Computer Science at Cambridge, I was looking for internships in software development. Ghyston originally came under my radar at my university’s careers fair where the prospect of working on real, interesting projects caught my eye. The application process was actually really enjoyable: at every step of the way, I was challenged with difficult but intriguing problems that were fun to work through and find the optimal solution for.
My internship lasted for nine weeks over the summer. We spent the first two weeks getting up to speed with the technologies that Ghyston uses. I found learning the various frontend languages and frameworks the most challenging to start with as I hadn’t had any experience in web development before but there were several more experienced developers that were always happy to give advice and help in order to improve our understanding. By the end of the training period, I already felt a lot more confident in my new found skills.
What sort of work were you doing?
We then moved onto working on a real project. I worked as part of a team with three other interns which was a really good supportive group to be part of as we were all learning together as we went along. For the main part of the project, we were focusing on developing the user interface for the website using the React framework in TypeScript. I really enjoyed this part as it helped me to learn and develop skills lacking in my university course.
I was also given the responsibility of setting up a test deployment for our project. This was a fairly overwhelming task to start with as I had no idea what to do but I was eventually able to fully automate this process. It was really satisfying to manage to get it to this state and is probably my biggest accomplishment of my time here.
In our final two weeks, we moved on to implementing the backend of our application. Although we didn’t get a chance to finish this, it was really interesting to get a chance to try both sides of the development stack and to get a flavour of what working as part of a full stack team in the future would be like.
Is there anything you particularly liked?
One of the development practices that I found the most helpful during our project was code reviews where other members of your team, including in our case more experienced developers, look over all the code you write to ensure it’s up to standard. This might sound a little intimidating (and it was at first) but I found this process incredibly useful in helping to identify more efficient or neater ways to do things. I was also able to correct bad habits I’d picked up while teaching myself to code previously. Overall this practice has allowed me to write much cleaner, higher quality code.
Outside of work, there were several really fun social events that helped to make me really feel part of the company, even though I was only here for a short while.
My experience at Ghyston has been amazing and I can thoroughly recommend that anyone else considering a software development internship applies here.
