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Meia
Meia

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Lessons from my first internship

  • results count. Review PR's (even if you don't understand them. just review them and ask questions). Close as MANY tickets as you can.
  • it's necessary to study for work after hours. especially if you're making a career change -- you want to learn on the side as much as possible.
  • verbal communication is key. know your terms--know how to understand and communicate what you need because even if you know code, most of the time people just want to verbalize it to you and have you understand.
  • record what you do. in your perosnal brag doc, record everything you're proud of (even the littlest things!). in another, record everything you've learned. in another, take screenshots of what you did.
  • working with legacy code is hard. there will be some code that's been there for ages that needs to be deleted, but no one does bc they're too afraid to. there is some code that might not make a complete amount of sense bc there weren't easier ways to do it back in the day. there is also some code that doesn't exist bc it was accidentally erased at some point. you can learn more about the code that changed by checking the blame on github.
  • for reviewing pr's -- going from smaller codebases (like yours, or colleagues) to a legacy codebase can be intimidating. if you don't understand, try going commit-by-commit and learning from there.

Note: This post was started a while back (~2 yrs ago), but never published.

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