Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post.
Good, better, best. Never let it rest!
By James Hu (EN ’21)
My name is James Hu and I am a rising junior at WashU majoring in computer science. It’s been three weeks since I started my internship with Fanvie. Fanvie is a startup that aims to build an app that allows fans in sports stadiums/ arenas to interact with each other during the game. This app offers a variety of games for users to pick sides “Home/Away” and the winners win a prize. Right now, I am developing the app for the company. I applied to this internship because I am a big sports fan and I wanted to apply the skills I learnt to real-life use. Also, event though I have some experience in developing, I have never tried iOS development, so I could anticipate the challenge for me. But it turned out the challenge was even greater.
Initially the founder, Courtney, told me that I would be building the app using swift and focused mainly on the front-end stuff. I spent the first week implementing the login functionality for users with Facebook Login, Google Login and Text Message Login. For a developer with almost no experience in iOS development (except for some online courses), it was really a tremendous week for me. Courtney gave me the goal and let me decide how to approach the problem. I really enjoyed this working style, as I believe as a developer, self-motivation and self-learning are really important as there are so many resources out there, I just need to explore myself. As one of my CS professor said, “The best way to make progress as a computer science student is to struggle through your mistakes and correct them.” I think this sentence really captures my week one experience. Moreover, the working environment at the TREX building is really amazing. It is so spacious that everyone can find his/her own space and yet there is always privacy so that I won’t be distracted from working. You can really sense the creativity from the workers there. Everyone is coming up new ideas and sharing.
The more challenging part came during week two. As I was trying to connect my app with the backend server, which was written by another group of developers who had already ended their contract with Fanvie, but there were problems with their code. It was such a painful experience to read somebody else’s thousand lines of messy code and try to figure out what went wrong. My boss Courtney always believed in me and he always told me,“James, we are going to get there, I know you can do it!” But he always challenges me with new tasks so that I can learn more. I really appreciate him for giving me this opportunity and asking me to do more when I thought I already did something good. Even though it’s been a bit more than two weeks, I could say I’ve learnt so much and my tasks have been growing so much that I am a much better developer than I was before this summer. Yet I still have about 8 weeks to go! Really looking forward to it!