My First Backend Development Internship!

Sushant Kumar Das — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:34:45 +0000

Hello fellow Devs!

I hope you are doing well. This blog post is just me summarising the journey I've had in the past few months, so this is more for me than anyone else. But you are absolutely welcome to read it.

So a few days back, I finally concluded my first Backend Developer Internship that started in September 2021. These 4 months were filled with excitement and memorable learning experiences. Since a small blog entry would be an injustice to it, I will divide it into a couple or more posts. So let's start at the beginning...

Moments Before Applying

I was in my second year of B.Tech during March 2021 and it was about to be over. So like some other friends of mine, I wanted to do an internship in summer break (May, June, July). I had prepared my resume for the same with whatever much I had done and learnt till then.
(4-5 okayish projects, created a shop management desktop app for a nearby shop, wrote a few articles as technical content writer for geeksforgeeks.)

Now in retrospect this sounds good enough to apply for internships. But at the time, I felt there was something lacking. And I wanted to fix it. So I worked more and more. Changed complete format of resume thrice, along with infinite edits in each.

In late April, I prepared everything and went on internshala and angel.co to apply for internships. But something funny kept happening. Every time, I would fill the form and answer the "Why should we hire you?" etc questions, but when it came to finally clicking on submit, I just couldn't do it.

Instead I would just close the tab, and go back to learning something more. Making something new. Using another API. Just anything but submit.
I learnt a few more things during these iterations. (docker, docker-compose, node, sqlite etc.) And before I realised, the summer was over.

Finally, at the end of August, a friend of mine pushed me to apply and see what happens. So August 28th, I finally pushed the submit button on 4 applications (after the first one, it became easier).

And surprise surprise! I got a call back from 2 of the 4 internships, the next day itself. One of them scheduled an interview for 30th which I cleared rather smoothly (that's debatable though. It was my first interview so I was quite nervous.).

And this is how I, the anxious developer, started my internship in a side branch of Proffus, Ztocks Pvt. Ltd., as a Backend Developer, assigned to create the backend of a production level application from scratch.
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In the next post, I will tell you about the first month of my internship and how I handled (or rather mishandled) it.
Thanks for reading. :)

Flask, CSS and Cache walked into a bar...

Sushant Kumar Das — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 07:23:00 +0000

Hello reader :)

I would finish this joke but it's meaningless without context. Hence bear with me till the end, to experience the best joke ever.

So yesterday night, I was learning flask from a freecodecamp video, and it was pretty decent. The video begins with some boilerplate, followed by the concept of templates and their inheritance. Now I faced an error, and I assume some of you guys might have faced this in the beginning too.

The CSS stylesheet that I linked in the 'base.html' file, didn't seem to work.

I tried everything, and all my code seemed to be fine as I referred to multiple sites. I rewrote the code, just to make sure I didn't commit some stupid mistake (btw my code worked in the first go with no errors except for the damn CSS.). Eventually, I was frustrated and left it.

But as fate would have it, I searched for 'CSS with flask error' on google today, just to see if other people might have faced it (In retrospect, should have done this yesterday.). And the god of programming, Stack Overflow, came to my rescue.

It had the exact same problem as mine, with 11 answers. Since the first and the most upvoted answer is usually the right one, I read it and found that I had already tried it all (The damn answer was long).

And right when I had almost lost hope, when future seemed bleak and life felt meaningless, I saw the next answer... it changed my life. I am a better person because of it. I got out of my depression and set up a billion-dollar company (all this happened a few minutes ago.)
The answer was written by Tanishka Gupta, and I quote:

try reloading the chrome using
ctrl + shift + R

And if you think this is funny, what do you think about the fact that it actually worked?

So finally, when my laughter stopped, I read a comment on this answer by VocoJax and I quote:

WHAT KIND OF MAGIC IS THIS??

(The capitalization is not my addition. It was commented this way.)

The comment described both my emotions, and the next fit of laughter I couldn't explain to my co-residents, pretty well.

So after some research, I understood that chrome saves a copy of CSS file in its cache on the first load, and uses it for that session. Simple reloads do not reset the browser cache, hence any of my changes in the CSS file weren't reflecting in the browser window. ctrl + shift + R does a complete reset of the window thus clearing the cache and using the source CSS file. Which in turn reflects the changes you do in your CSS file. Simple enough?

And hence to end this article and to finish my stupid joke,

Flask said "You still haven't changed CSS.", to which CSS said, "Hold my cashe!".

I know the joke wasn't good. Thanks for sticking around though.

Au revoir. :)
(I don't really know French.)

DEV Community: Sushant Kumar Das

My First Backend Development Internship!

Moments Before Applying

Flask, CSS and Cache walked into a bar...