Q&A with Kamil on his internship at Kiwee

Discover how it is to have a Full Stack Developer internship at Kiwee! Read Kamil's opinion on our values, workflows, company culture, and more!

1. Quick intro?

Hi, my name is Kamil. I'm a Computer Science student at Wroclaw University of Science & Technology. When it comes to programming, I really like Javascript and its frameworks. Besides that, I love kitesurfing and electric skateboards.

2. Why did you choose Kiwee for your internship?

I started searching for an internship quite early to find the best possible company. I wanted to have the ability to work with the front-end as well as with the back-end. It was very important for me to start my professional career as a full-stack developer. I met Kiwee at a job fair, and after a short conversation, I realized that this company could give me this opportunity. I was surprised by the amount of different technologies that are used in the company, but it made me feel certain that it is the best place to become a full-stack developer so, after the event, I sent my application.

3. What was your work scope and set of tasks?

I was working on our internal projects, the Kiwee website, and Jira invoicing application. My tasks were to implement a new subpage template to our website and add several features to the Jira invoicing application. Especially subpage implementation was quite challenging since I didn’t have any experience with PHP previously. Furthermore, this task required me to get to know WordPress, which was new to me as well. Adding new features to the Jira invoicing application was also very interesting. Despite the fact that I’ve already known Vue.js and Node.js, both are the main part of the application, I've noticed many great solutions already implemented in the application that are worth keeping in mind for the future.

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

It is for sure the professionalism and top-notch quality of every solution that Kiwee releases. I did not expect such a small company to approach software development so restrictively, following the processes described in detail. Everything is planned here from start to end. The second thing is that Kiwee has great documentation so there are no unnecessary questions or misunderstandings. This is especially useful during the first couple of weeks in the company. I also didn’t expect to be treated as a regular team member. Kiwee gave me the opportunity to feel like a true software engineer with equal rights to much more experienced developers.

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

The biggest challenge was the DevOps part of my tasks. I didn’t have much experience with it before, and it was hard for me to jump into tasks related to this field of programming. It took me a lot of time to finish one big DevOps task, but I feel much more confident in this field after completing it. However, it wouldn’t be successful without help from my mentor, Krzysiek. He gave me confidence and tips during the toughest moments. After three months, I can say that this was the most challenging task but also the most valuable one.

6. What are the biggest learnings you have after this experience?

As I mentioned before, I’ve learned lots of new technical knowledge, as well as confidence in the skills I’ve had previously. Apart from that, maybe the most important, I’ve learned to fit into existing projects and different work cultures. Kiwee was a great place to gain this type of experience.

7. A LOL moment you will never forget?

Oh, that is for sure bug fixing together with Krzysiek! It doesn’t sound like a LOL moment, but it definitely was! It was great fun doing this annoying type of work together. My second favorite type of LOL moments was exchanging funny stories during scrum meetings. Maybe those meetings should be purely technical, but some funny stories made them more enjoyable!

8. What would you say to future Kiwee’s interns?

Congratulations! The recruitment process was really tough, but you managed to make it!
Now, listen carefully to other team members, study workflows documentation, try to follow it, and don’t hesitate to ask if you don’t understand something. Everyone is here to help you (I’m serious, there was a task where I asked literally everyone for help 🙂 ). Try not to panic when you destroy staging (I did it for over a week, and I’m still living 🙂 ) or anything else, and good luck!

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