Over the past four months, I have been an intern at Golem Foundation and working on the Wildland client. As the summer comes to a close, I took some time to look back on the main lessons and experiences during my time on the team. As a first-year with very little prior experience, I was understandably anxious about joining a team of experienced (seasoned) developers - I didn’t know what to expect from the company culture and was overall nervous about not being as prepared for the role as I’d have preferred. I recognised that to make the most of my time with Wildland, I’d have to learn a lot rather quickly and took it upon myself to do so.

My first day at the office calmed my anxieties down considerably. I was quickly assigned a senior developer who patiently walked me through the fundamentals and ensured none of my questions remained unanswered. I was also met with understanding and given adequate time to familiarise myself with the client.

Company Culture

When applying for internships, many students tend to discount the importance of company culture. I reckon a few months back I would not expect my favourite part of the internship to be just that - the openness and comfort that comes with a closely knitted and welcoming team like the one at Golem Foundation.

People

Although I joined the team as nothing more than a soon-to-be second-year student with little prior experience, I immediately felt welcomed and treated with respect. The general attitude at the office was kept light and everyone was always ready to answer any questions that might’ve arisen as I learned.

Merging into the team

The first task I have been assigned during my time at Golem Foundation was no different from the usual welcoming tasks granted to new developers joining the team. Though this may seem stressful to some, I found it thrilling and, in a way, reassuring. Despite my lack of professional background, I was expected to learn and grow; thus, I was willing to make the most of the trust given to me and try to accomplish the task best as I could.

As a result, after a little more than three weeks of reading through the code and studying the documentation, I successfully created my first Wildland plugin - the GitLab storage backend, which enables the users to easily fetch issues assigned to their chosen project and incorporate them into their personal Wildland forest.

Since then, I have worked on multiple different plugins - handling both the coding of the backend itself as well as writing tests and filling out the documentation for each of them. The learning curve may have been scarily steep at first, but looking back I can only appreciate the knowledge I gained over the past four months and recognise how my attitude towards new challenges has changed. All in all, I suppose things always seem impossible until they’re done - the same applies to becoming a developer.

Moving forward

As excited as I am to return to my studies, I am also quite sad for my time as an intern here to be over. I’m thankful to be met witch such a warm welcome to the industry and I’m more than grateful to Michał, Joanna, and the rest of the team for the endless opportunities to learn and grow.

So here’s to my summer of 2021, my first one as an undergraduate.