It has been a little over a month since I have been working at Booz Allen as an intern, and so far, I have been really enjoying my work fellowship! I am very much a glass half full person, so I would like to start out with all the things that are going well in the program.
My team is super friendly and very welcoming to me and the other fellows. The team seems to have very good communication, which I think is a big plus to learn from. The first couple of weeks were consumed with a lot of on-boarding: filling out forms, doing training sessions, more forms, setting up email, payroll, yada yada yada. But, now we are starting to get into the thick of it and are starting to work on our project, and I am really excited about the work we are about to be doing.
This project has been very different from any project I have worked on before (i.e, basically no project). The stack we are using is around Ruby on Rails; I only have experience using Java and Spring Boot. While a little intimidating at first, I have been enjoying the low-pressure atmosphere of learning a new programming language for this project. After the struggle with downloading our repo and setting up the IDE (I will get to that in a bit), it is really cool to be looking through the code-base and see familiar terms instead of a completely foreign language. I feel like I am starting to see progress from only a month ago.
Since we set up our project last week, I have been working with my team to help map out different parts of the current code-base of the project that we are taking over. This is an interesting project because our team is picking up in the middle of the project’s development, so there is a lot of reverse engineering going on. The entire team is working on figuring out what is going on with the code and how everything works before we start tearing up the floorboards and making major changes. Honestly, while a little chaotic, it has been a great opportunity to join the team because I feel like I am in a similar place with a lot of my teammates in that we are trying to figure out this project from the ground up. While it can be a little tedious, I have been enjoying going over the previous documentation for the project, trying to figure out how things work and how we can make improvements. It makes me hopeful that if this is the hard part, I’m REALLY going to love when we start writing code!
While my experience has been great on the whole, I did have some struggles this first month. Well, mostly one issue: pulling the repo and setting up our environment on our local machines. The process seemed simple at first: follow the directions and your environment would be set up. Unfortunately, most of the team had issues with install scripts not running right, downloads failing, and a whole bunch of mess that could only be solved with an advanced knowledge of the CLI and a bunch of dumb luck. It didn’t help either that we had to uninstall Docker Desktop due to the license changing. Thanks to the patience of Matt, another fellow, and our team lead, Kevin, I was able to get my installation fixed and working after 2-3 whole days of troubleshooting. From my understanding, I think the rest of the team is close to getting everything up and running, too.
All in all, this has been a really cool opportunity. While a little rocky at times, this is all part of the job, and I am loving every second of it!
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