Every day at Jackpine would start with the SCRUM call. In this call, every employee of Jackpine would attend and report on the status of their projects, what they accomplished, and if they had any “blockers” (things that prevented them from accomplishing what they planned on). Being interns, we often didn’t have much to report on, but SCRUM was always helpful in figuring out what was happening on a larger scale with the company.
After SCRUM finished, I, along with my fellow intern Nico, would start to make progress on our project. The goal of our project was to create a single-page web application that displays the current status of the developer (Dev-Ops) services. Essentially, any device in Jackpine could navigate to this web page and see whether a certain Dev-Ops service was running as intended, and, if not, investigate the problem. This web page, once completed, was to be displayed on a monitor in the front lobby of their office, so we had to design our web-page to be readable from a distance while still looking professional up close.
In order to complete this project, we needed to use the front-end and back-end capabilities of Javascript. Let me explain: the front-end (otherwise known as ‘client-side’) code displays the user-interface (UI) of a website. For example, when you go onto espn.com, the majority of what you see; the page orientation and layout, the menus and buttons, the links and graphics, are determined by the front-end code. The back-end code (otherwise known as ‘server-side’) handles all interactions with the server. For example, if you create an ESPN account and draft a fantasy football team, your account information and the information about who is on your team is stored in the server. The back-end code manages how that information is stored and accessed. Javascript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world because it can be effectively used both on the server-side and the client-side.
Nico and I decided to display the data of the Dev-Ops status in the form of traffic lights. In our web-app, if a given service was working as intended in all of its recent tests, a green traffic light would be displayed with the name of the service below it. Logically, if some tests failed, the light would be yellow, and if all of them failed, the light would be red. Working at Jackpine, Nico and I had a lot of freedom in how we decided to organize our web-page, which is something we didn’t expect to have. As opposed to being told exactly what to do, we had an end goal, and as long our web-page fulfilled that goal, we had completed our job.
After the six weeks of our internship, we had finally completed what we set out to do. While there was a rather huge learning curve and a lot of time spent stuck on errors, the sense of accomplishment and gratification after completing a step and getting something to work is something that isn’t easy to replicate. Through this internship, I not only learned a plethora of real-world coding skills, but I also learned how to manage myself in a professional work environment. I would like to express my gratitude for the great opportunity that I was given to work at Jackpine, as I will never forget the skills I learned, and more importantly, the experience of working in a great company with great people