Getting started
At the beginning of the week, I met Hugh, an intern and Ben, a senior developer who explained the planning applications map they were working on. They taught me how the code and development environment worked. I was unfamiliar with the language and setup they were using, but with their help I managed to adapt to it fairly quickly. The first day ended with a meeting, looking at user needs for the project. This helped me get a sense of how things operate in a working environment. It also allowed me to identify how I could contribute to the project by tackling one of the needs.
Learning about coding, challenges and collaboration
On Tuesday I started working on adding a new feature to filter the results by certain conditions. While I ran into some challenges with handling an unfamiliar programming language, the clear plan I had from the prior meeting helped me stay on track. I also took part in a design meeting. We looked at case studies of corporations rebrands to find what made them successful so that we could identify features and principles that would help this agency. I found looking at a new discipline interesting and learned that it is important to keep informed on all aspects of a project's development (even if I wasn’t going to be involved in them). Having an understanding of what the team is trying to achieve makes collaboration clearer and more effective.
On Wednesday, I built on the work I had done by doing some front end development so that my features could actually be used by a potential client. Because I had no experience in this area, I inevitably ran into issues. From talking to the team, I got support in fixing errors and realised that running into obstacles is a part of the process. This not only helped me with my technical skills, as I was learning a whole new side of coding, but it gave me a better perspective on working on a project. I now understood that problems shouldn’t be met with frustration but instead a positive attitude.
