Let’s start to talk about the first week of my work and internship at Locate a Locum. What should I say? This is definitely the best part of the stay abroad so far till now. Seriously! I’m impressed. I got so lucky with the small but very lovely and productive team. I’ve learned so much in just a couple of days already! This is also because of working very closely with my amazing colleague Paul for sure. He’s just a front-end genius and what’s even much better about him: He loves to teach people and has created even an own course for the very famous coding teaching platform Codecademy, which I love and worked many times with it!
Okay, enough excitement for now! Let’s get back to my work (environment) facts and details. Our team consists of ten people (two of them are developer) and some freelancer, who are not coming to the office. Conaire is the first developer from the very first beginning of Locate a Locum. Paul, the other developer, just started last Monday but has done all the front-end stuff since six month on a freelancer basis already. It took some time to convince him of quitting his last job, which he totally loved actually. But Paul and Michael (Co-founder) know each other for a quite long time – to be exact: since school! So there’s is a reason that people say „What doesn’t one do for good old friends“, right?
Day 1: The fear to make myself look completely stupid on the first working day because of having not enough experiences probably turned out to be totally wrong which eased me and took so much pressure off myself. At this point I want to thank my other dear colleague Benjamin Vetter in Berlin for being a very good teacher as well and giving me enough lessons about some front-end basics, which is probably one of the main reasons that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself on my first day! Conaire and Paul started to give me a general overview about all the back-end and front-end developments, which they did and all the tools they’re working with. Luckily I understood mostly of the general structure and recognized even a lot of similarities with the web framework Dancer2 I’ve worked with back in Berlin. After the introduction I got my first task to have a exact look on the website, taking screenshots of all the bugs I recognize, writing a ticket for each of them and working them off finally. I was really happy to finish this amazing and satisfying first working day with closing two tickets! I even managed it to go straightly to the gym after, which made me feel like, lets’s say quite a nerdy version of Hulk.
Day 2 & 3: The next days consisted of lots of caffein shocks, trying hardly keep on building up my own version of Hulk and working the open tickets off, like building a new footer for the website and e-mail submit sections etc. and solving some problems with git branches and pull requests, which were actually super good in retrospect because I internalised all the progress finally. I mean I don’t have to mention actually that human beings learn the best out of problems and mistakes (unfortunately), so did I. Before I forget to mention this world-shaking happening: At the end of the third working day dear Santa Claus came a bit earlier and put a new monitor on my working desk. Was I really such a good girl that he made an exception? This made my day seriously plus the fact that I could get rid off some annoying CSS bugs, oh and that my beloved fiancé arrived in the same day to visit me till Sunday (in a nice rented flat and car)!
Day 4 and yes, it’s FriYAY: Today I fixed the last little bugs before Conaire will merge and launch the edited site finally! So excited to see the results which I’m a part of as well. I tell you, there’s no better feeling and probably the main reason why I decided to become a developer. The whole team and I (plus fiancé) will go to grab some drinks later straight after work. How this evening ends, I’ll write later – or not, depending on how it will degenerate…