The story of Agnes, intern at icapps
When I was looking for an internship, icapps was recommended to me by someone who already did his internship with them. After scanning their website and social media channels, it’s safe to say I was hooked. I could relate to their values and on top of that, the office just looked really fancy! On February 10, my 13-week internship at icapps finally began. From day one, I felt like I was part of the team. Four days a week, my role as an intern was inferior to my role as a real colleague of the ‘Pixelpack’ development team. And what a great team to be a part of! They really bring the ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality alive.
As part of my bachelor thesis, I redeveloped a full-stack conference tool for XP days. The app allows speakers to set up sessions that get automatically translated into a daily schedule for the conference. Both back-end and front-end development were part of my job, and I am proud of what I accomplished. The conference tool required an automatization of planning, and I was able to implement this by means of ‘constraint programming’. I had to make sure that the app wouldn’t schedule 2 sessions at the same time or in the same room. During the development process, I wasn’t on my own, luckily. I was assigned to two developers who guided me throughout the process. We held daily stand-up meetings with our scrum master, who happened to be my mentor as well!
This internship has taught me so much more than I expected. I learned to write in React, and I’m now able to create a basic application from scratch. I discovered the ‘Scrum way of working’, and the frustration that comes with a pull request. But surprisingly, the biggest learnings were about myself; how important it is for me to achieve goals, and the way I handle stress. My first demo was really nerve-wracking and I got frustrated whenever I wasn’t up to speed with something. I didn’t want to waste any time searching for the right solution. But I’ve made great progress with that. My teammates reassured me that not knowing everything is normal. For them, it was all about me learning new things - not developing apps speedy gonzales style.
And the result? This project continued even after my internship ended. The Pixelpack team will make sure the app will be launched. How cool is that?! Eventually, I’ve decided to take a different path, and study Japanology - something I've wanted to do for a long time now!
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