4 tips I learned in my last software engineering internship.

“I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.” — Larry King

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

Here I am. I am completing my information technology engineering degree. When I look back at the last four years, I am amazed.

Like they always say, it’s about the journey, not the destination, right?

Well, my journey started with my first real internship back in 2020. Mid pandemic, I joined a team and started working as a frontend developer! After two internships, three and a half years of excruciating university courses, and two broken keyboards, I’m ready to share my learnings.

1. Documentation, documentation, documentation

Agile was created as a set of practices to make software development more efficient. Mainly it involves increasing the number of releases so that the software gets build by iteration instead of using the old waterfall process. In many teams, doing documentation is sadly neglected.

We want to be agile so bad that we forget about the basics. The problem is, our codebases get big and difficult to understand. The whole “ the code should explain itself” philosophy is not always the solution.

2. Software engineering is 20% coding.

My college professors would be proud of this sentence. In my last internship, I realized software engineering does not only mean giving orders to a computer to create a program.

It’s about designing, maintaining, testing, and of course, writing a program to solve problems for users. It was weird for me to start working on a new story and not get straight to VsCode. I got annoyed some days when I did not have any pull requests. Ultimately, I was able to learn good code quality habits. One of them was that sometimes not writing code is a solution. Additionally, that code recycling can sting you later in the back.

3. Four months go by fast. Take chances.