Full Stack Development Intern

The system

Three months, and the first time my code ran somewhere I could not restart. Prospeer put interns on real tickets against the production codebase — small ones, but shipped end to end rather than thrown over a wall.

I worked on the Django backend and the client screens that talked to it. Nothing I built was load-bearing. All of it was reviewed twice.

What was hard

The gap between working and shipped. My first pull request worked on my machine and took nine days to merge. The difference was everything I had not considered: the migration, the edge cases in the form, what happens when the request is slow, and how much the reviewer would have to read.

Reading review as instruction rather than verdict. That took a few rounds. The comments that stayed with me were about naming, and about deleting code instead of commenting it out.

Understanding the deploy. I had never watched a release go out before this, and once watched one go badly. It taught me more about writing careful code than any amount of local testing had.

What I would do differently

I optimised for closing tickets rather than for understanding the product. The interns who asked what the thing was actually for were more useful by month three than I was.