My First Backend Development Internship!

#beginners #career #python #devjournal

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. :)