Internship Blog 1
Hello everyone, in this blog I will be sharing with you some of my thoughts on my internship experience as a Quality Assurance Intern over the past four weeks.
About my role
The company that I am currently working for is gigturbo.Inc, which is a business of developing a personalized AI Scheduling Assistant service that aims to help people to take advantage of the gig economy at a faster and more efficient pace. And as a Quality Assurance Intern, I was mainly taking charge of reinforcing the stability of their website over the first few weeks, (or in a less official manner - finding bugs and log them down :)
On a grinding weekday, I normally wake up at 5 am. and work from 6 am to 13 pm. To maximize my productivity, I usually put the most challenging work at the very beginning of my day followed by a coffee break. I reckon this is a productive period for me, which really allows me to get most of the important work done for the day.
How do I get this Intern
Before I start to share any idea about the recruitment process, I want to give a huge thanks to Jason Ramsay from The Intern Group, he really helped me a lot by helping me finding possible roles, organizing interviews, providing me constructive feedback on my progress and so on. During the interview with the founder of gigturbo.Inc, Ali, we discussed many aspects of my roles, such as required skills, timezone difference, expectations, etc. Our interview went well and I eventually become part of gigturbo’s QA team.
Challenges and highlights
Challenges come from various aspects, technically, I got allocated web scraping tasks at the third week - something I have never done. The soon as I receive this task, I quickly taught myself python and any relevant web scrapping knowledge that is required for the task. The greatest takeaway from this challenge is that one’s speed of learning knowledge can be extremely fast when he gets to apply that knowledge in a real project. I used to try learning python by myself in my first year at uni, and I quit due to lacking a real goal by failing to answer the question - “why am I learning python?'.
My QA team tech lead appreciates me for making fairly good progress in web scrapping, at the meantime, I also feel so great about learning key skills within a short time and applying them to successfully accomplish given tasks for a project.
My upcoming weeks
As I am getting more familiar with the context/tasks of my internship, I will be undertaking more challenging web scrapping tasks for the upcoming weeks. I also realize there are possible improvements that I could make from reviewing my previous python web scrapping script such as enhancing efficiency, removing duplicate codes, and using more advanced python features for data storage. These will be my main focus for next month.