Everything about my 3 month internship at GovTech 2022 May - July.
Before
I applied to many places hoping that maybe I could score an internship (all the generic good places) with my limited experience in the industry. Most of my experience comes from working as a contract SWE at RFCom Technologies. Other than that I worked at Travel Prologue as an intern. I could get all these experiences from connections and they were a big hep in filling out my resume trying to find other jobs.
The person that hired me from Travel Prologue tried to contact me to come back and work for them again but I had changed my number during national service and I didn't know. It was only long after that fact that I heard the news, so oops, my bad.
There were a few technical coding rounds that I tried and GovTech was the only one that responded back. Seeing that I was already a month or two into the job hunt I decided it was a decent place to intern at, and continued further down the interview path. I actually had 1 more coding round from a finance company that I decided not to do, since I had to re-learn C++ to do it.
The interview was really simple except that fact that I forgot everything about databases, which they asked a few questions about. With that I got hired as an intern at GovTech for the Personalise team for my summer before university starts.
Start
Right when my internship started at GovTech some of the Covid restrictions got lifted, so more people could go to the work place. I got pretty worried since I was juggling some other stuff (SoB) and going to the workplace means adding 2 hours of travel time to my weekdays. That would have been disastrous and I probably would have had to drop my other commitments. Luckily for me GovTech still mostly practices work from home and I got let off the hook. Lucky.
A few days before I was supposed to report to work my "Reporting Officer" (RO) gave me the information on everything I had to install and do, which was pretty good. The RO was one of the SWEs in the team and not the tech lead, so to be honest I was less stressed asking about small stuff. I went to take the company's macbook which was also my first time at the Sandcrawler building that DCube was in. The place is really close to the mrt and the building itself is pretty cool, though not having a staff pass meant that you had to deal with security everytime you were waiting for someone to let you in.
I got introduced to everyone on the team, which included 4 SWEs, 1 data engineer, 1 designer and 1 person that dealt with the clients (I forgot the title). The project itself is pretty huge actually, tons of submodules in the backend and a react frontend website was what I was introduced to. There are actually other components in the project but those were mostly for the AI and its implementation, which I was not really brought in to help with.
Everyone was a full-stack SWE which is a classic. I was given some very basic tasks as a start to get myself familiarized with the codebase, one of which was to change the website banner to the current year. It didn't cross my mind to make the banner the current year, since the task told me to change it to 2022. So I went ahead and pushed a very short 2 liner which still somehow had some peer review changes requested on it. After some time when the tech lead looked at the task he said just change the banner to the current year and it clicked in my head that I messed up. I wasn't thinking ahead and pushed stuff out without thinking through them, which I though was really bad, even though the consequences was pretty trivial.
Middle
After getting used to the coding environment and all the schedules it was honestly pretty smooth sailing from there. The only problem I encountered was trying to find out which API I had to use and how to use it. Since the team is pretty small the amount of tech debt it had existing inside the code base is to be expected. The lack of documentation is also not a surprise so your choices really are to either memorize which piece of code is where, dig around until you find it, or to ask someone who does.
This is around the time where I took on the task to handle data for the new Key Results (KR) that the team needed. Metrics such as the number of people who used a certain feature etc. needed to be recorded down so that we can keep track of it more closely. There were other issues such as the data collected being filled with actions that the developers had done. In the task I had to track several new metrics and clean up the dirty data, finally uploading all of them onto AWS CloudWatch.
