Q&A with Adam on his Full-stack Developer internship at Kiwee

This is an interview with Adam - a summer Full-stack Developer intern at Kiwee. He answers eight questions every intern is traditionally asked at the end of their internship at Kiwee.

Quick intro?

Hi, I am Adam and I am a student of Applied Computer Science at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. I like listening to music and coding silly side projects that feel satisfying (even simultaneously). I don't like the Singleton Design Pattern and the passage of time, especially when coding.

Why did you choose Kiwee for your internship?

I was looking for a full-stack internship. I wanted to see the production-ready code both on the front end and also on the back end. It all comes down to having a holistic approach to developing software. I wanted to see every part of the process of creating a fully functional solution. Kiwee's company website listed some of the languages and frameworks I was familiar with. So I gave it a try.

What was your work scope and set of tasks?

I spent most of my internship working on the company website and an internal project. At first, I had to fix some bugs, but later I added a few new features. I worked mostly within JavaScript frameworks, so I felt rather comfortable because I had some prior experience with this language.

Team brainstorming of technology radar ideas

What’s one thing you did not expect to see in Kiwee that positively surprised you?

I didn't expect that everyone would be so helpful and dedicated. I got help or guidance from all of the team members. It was great to know that if I wasn't sure about something (not always related to coding) I always had someone to reach out to. My mentor Serge was always around and willing to not only help but also chat about topics I found interesting even if they weren't strictly related to my tasks.

What was the biggest challenge you had to tackle during the internship?

Funnily enough, my biggest challenge was my first task, I had to update Node.js and dependencies used in the company website. The dependencies were not updated for some time, so multiple breaking changes occurred. Most of them could be fixed using documentation of an update. Unfortunately, it wasn't smooth sailing all the way. At some point, I ran into an issue with the regression testing suite. The issues that it produced were the worst kind because they were indeterministic and appeared to be random. The solution was rather unpredictable because it involved undocumented changes to the testing framework's configuration options.

What are the biggest learnings you have after this experience?

I learned quite a lot about development workflow, I got to train my git skills to maintain clean and descriptive history. During work on an internal project, I got familiar with GraphQL. I always used standard REST API calls so a new approach to network requests was quite an interesting thing to learn. Thanks to my mentor, Serge I got familiar with JS libraries that embrace functional programming paradigms such as Ramda (which I enjoy using).

A LOL moment you will never forget?

There were quite a few of them. The first one happened before I even got the internship. During the non-technical interview with Anna Sawicka, I mentioned that I would be eager to work with the Django framework because I thought that it was listed as the tech stack Kiwee uses. Anna reminded me that Kiwee currently doesn't have any projects written with Django. At that moment I realized that during the interview I mixed up the stack used at Kiwee with another company I was interviewing for. It was rather a silly mistake, but back then I felt embarrassed. In hindsight, I find it funny and wonder how it might have looked from Anna's perspective. Another time I was preparing a release of new features and bugfixes. I confirmed the release with our CTO Tomek and pushed it to production. Unfortunately, no one realized that it was a Friday (Tomek thought that it was a Thursday). Thankfully everything worked fine, so no one had to work on the weekend, the team had some laughs about it, and new rules regarding release planning were introduced.

What would you say to future Kiwee interns?

Use this opportunity to learn as much as possible. There are experienced developers around you, and they want to share their knowledge with you. Appreciate the feedback. Making mistakes is natural. Having someone around you knowledgeable enough to catch them is a blessing. Last but not least, don't release on Fridays.

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