In March 2022, I was fortunately to join CADDi Inc. for a month-long internship as a frontend developer. It was an amazing and fruitful experience.
Why I joined the internship
Without any explanation, it might be hard to imagine why a company in the manufacturing industry would need a large team of developers. However, the message from the CEO and the CTO about the company explains this: by leveraging the power of IT to facilitate operations, CADDi attempts to transform the manufacturing industry, which I found very interesting.
Reading the Company Overview for Engineers also encouraged me to apply for this internship program. It gives a brief introduction to some of the products in CADDi and also introduces the technology stack used. This shows that the company is willing to adopt the best tools available to solve challenging problems, and also that the internship would be an opportunity to learn how to use many new tools.
There are also things that would have been hard to learn on one's own, working effectively as a member in a team of developers being one of them. Even though I have a few years of programming experience, I believe that I need to strive to become a better programmer and a better developer. Believing that this would be a precious learning experience, I applied and got an offer for the internship.
What I did during the internship
As an internship participant, I joined one of the teams in the company and had the chance to experience how it is like to be an actual software engineer. The following are some of the activities I participated in.
Development & code review
Most of the time in the internship was spent implementing new features and fixing bugs. Even though I joined as a frontend developer, I was able to read and modify the backend code in the same monorepo. I also spent some time reviewing and modifying the CI pipeline to improve developer experience.
In addition, we also reviewed each other's pull requests. Apart from catching mistakes in the changed code, it is also an excellent opportunity to share knowledge of how to write more maintainable code and gain understanding of a different part of the product when one is not involved in the development of the part.
Scrum meetings
I also spent time participating in scrum events like sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review and sprint retrospective. We were able to raise our concerns about what we find confusing during the development cycle and attempt to fix these problems to make the development process more efficient. I also got to understand how scrum allows a team to work towards a defined goal with trackable metrics.
User interview
There also happened to be several user interview sessions, where potential users are invited to try out new features and provide feedback to developers. It was a humbling experience, reminding me the reason that we develop the product is always to make something useful for the user.
What I had learnt from the internship
Technical knowledge
This internship has been an opportunity to experience using technologies that I have only heard about but never used before. Usually, in order to learn new technologies, one needs to be proactive in finding new technologies to learn and spend time finding resources and actually try to use the library. Through the internship, it is possible to learn new technologies quickly and gain a deep understanding reading code written by other developers.
As CADDi makes use of a frontend-BFF-backend architecture, this is my first experience using Protocol Buffer and gRPC. It is also my first time developing a project that adopts the clean architecture.
Fellow developers in the same team had been very kind to answer my questions and explain to me some of the things which I do not understand, for example how the application is deployed to the Kubernetes cluster from CI. Even though I joined a frontend engineer position, I was not limited to frontend development, and was able to learn much about backend development and DevOps.
The difference between personal programming and team programming
Personal programming and team programming are completely different. For instance, one has to pay particular attention to write code in a way that is easy for other developers to understand. This may include having a common way to structure code, writing comments to explain code if it is not obvious why it is done in a certain way, etc.
On the other hand, the friendly environment in CADDi had been really helpful. When one gets stuck while trying to solve a problem, it is easy to consult other team members for help. As members each have their own strengths and weaknesses, this allows us to combine the strengths and develop much faster than a single developer could.
The importance of reading and writing documentation
When knowledge is shared effectively among team members, it allows developers to solve problems more efficiently, without needing to ask other team members all the time. Meetings are of course one of the ways to do this, but documentation allows this knowledge to be retained even if members change teams.
By setting up a general convention on where to put documentation and nurturing a culture of reading it, the knowledge is effectively shared and preserved. Although effort is required to keep the documentation updated, it is arguably time well spent as not only can the onboarding cost for new members be reduced but also can developers reference it at any moment.
Ending Notes
After the end of the internship, I have gladly been allowed to join CADDi Inc. as a part-time software engineer.
Overall, the internship has been a very fruitful experience. I had gained much precious experience that would not have been possible without joining the internship. I believe that internship programs are excellent learning opportunities for aspiring engineering students, and starting early will open you to a world of opportunities.
