Summer 2015 was the best-spent summer I’ve had so far learning-wise.
I didn’t take web development too seriously before my internship. I found web dev to be depreciating in value because there are so many free website-making tools that exist nowadays. To me, there was just HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript, and some cool tidbits like Node and MongoDB and SQL and Firebase.
Over the course of my internship, I ended up learning how to use REST with the Play Framework, Scala, Java 8 (I had only used Java 7 in the past), Dust.js, Bacon.js, and Sass. It was a lot to digest, but it was incredible. I never knew there was so much involved with deploying large web applications, and how much of it I actually enjoyed.
I also attended the annual LinkedIn intern hackday, during which I got to play around with the Jade template engine, learned how to set up Grunt and bower and Sass, and experienced a bit of how the Express framework was set up.
A separate intern group project had me introduced to Handlebars, which I’m currently learning more about now in order to revamp my personal website. There’s so much cool technology floating around, but I couldn’t be more excited about web dev right now. I was pretty sure I’d never consider Web Development as a career only 3 months ago, but now it’s a lot of what I want to do in my personal projects.
PS: This was my first major internship, and it was in Silicon Valley. It definitely took some time to get used to the pace and how there were so many conversations about startups and stock and IPO and more abbreviations than I could remember.
The pace on the West Coast is definitely a different feel compared to the East Coast or the MidWest. There’s so many things going on at once, so many events, and so many companies, that the whole area and experience felt like some augmented reality sandbox.
Either way, I’m glad to be back at Cornell. It’s gonna be great this semester (look forward to a blog post on my upcoming classes!)
Adventures 