Last Month of Internship

And as usual, time flies. I am going to just briefly summarise and talk about the past 2 months of internship experience, as another chapter comes to a close.

Key Takeaways

• Read and understand documentation 📑: I think this internship has really taught me the importance of being able to read and digest documentations. I think as we learn more and more tech stacks in the future, it is really important to be able to grasp the technology fast through the documentation provided.

• Separation of Concerns: Learn how to adapt your development environments to suit development and production. Try to reduce coupling between modules so that you can maintain and update your codebase with greater ease. By reducing coupling, you make it easier to change one module without affecting others, leading to a more robust and flexible application. This separation also enhances collaboration among team members, as different groups can focus on individual modules without interfering with each other. It also enables you to isolate and resolve issues more efficiently, improving the quality and maintainability of your software.

• Testing: Tests are king. Tests pass, good to go. Tests fail, no go.

• Don’t use DynamoDB 😧: As much as I appreciate learning a new database, DynamoDB is so cumbersome and the time taken to write the ORM layer for the queries is just time consuming, without providing any real added value to it. I think a normal relational database would have fit our use case, but I guess the positive here is that we got to dive deeper into AWS services, since DynamoDB is hosted there.

I think all in all, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here. I think the upside was that since we were working by ourselves, working hours and objectives are really flexible and there is really no pressure whatsoever. However, also because of this, I feel like the internship has been quite dull in the sense that we don’t really get to interact much with other interns and people, besides the Intern Mentorship programme.

I do find the people here are also very friendly. There is just the vibe of wholesomeness and the atmosphere seems to be very bright and lively, which I think can be one important factor to prevent burnout.

With that, I guess my internship journeys in university life has come to an end. I am extremely thankful to Sam for providing this opportunity to intern at GovTech, and with that, a chapter has once closed and moving on to the next milestone in life, the real working life!