- November 20, 2020
A Conversation Between Development Interns
In late September, Happy Cog hired two web development interns: Emaan Riaz and Maria Martinez. Emaan attends the University of California, Davis and Maria attended NYU and then the Pursuit immersive technology program. In the past few months they’ve already done a great job making a huge impact at Happy Cog and on our projects. They wrote the following to reflect on their experience so far:
Emaan: In late September, Maria and I began working at Happy Cog as Web Development interns. Although the position is remote due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, we were both so excited to join the team. In the time since our onboarding, we have met so many great people, learned a ton about web development, and settled into a nice workflow.
Maria: We spent the first week or two adjusting to the new work environment and becoming more familiar with the tools and technologies that Happy Cog uses. At first, it was a little bit overwhelming to be introduced to so many new things at once, but in just a short period of time, we have already gained so much experience and knowledge.
Emaan: Definitely; everyone at Happy Cog was very warm and welcoming, which made the transition so much easier and seamless. I was surprised by how open and helpful everyone tries to be. In my second week, when I was having trouble setting up my local environment, I posted a question to the developer slack channel and immediately received great feedback and guidance.
Maria: I love that there are also slack channels for other fun topics like pets and food! It’s nice to be able to have more casual and amusing conversations with my coworkers.
I also really enjoy working with my mentor, Greg; he’s so patient, thorough, and super easy to understand. He’s been working with technologies like Craft and Docker for years now so it’s really great to learn from someone like him!
Emaan: My mentor, Oka, has also been in the industry for a long time – almost 15 years! She is always more than willing to hop on a call to discuss solutions, assist me in debugging, and share her knowledge with me. Now that I’m working on a project and writing code for production, it’s reassuring to know that I can work independently, but also ask for help whenever I need it.
Maria: Speaking of writing code, I’m excited that we’re going to be working together on an upcoming project. After our meeting with the design team today, I can’t wait to get started! This is going to be a great opportunity to learn more about how a design gets translated into code and how content is modeled on a CMS.
Emaan: Absolutely. Although the project I’m currently working on helped me become more familiar with Craft, I’m really looking forward to diving in deeper and gaining even more hands on experience with the development lifecycle.
The other aspect of this internship that I also enjoy is that we get to learn more about the industry by having meetings with people from different parts of the company! I thought it was really interesting to learn about the business side of web development, as well as the design process and quality assurance cycle.
Maria: Our meeting with Elise helped me understand so much more about marketing, SEO, and analytics. I also love that Happy Cog holds fun team bonding activities, like “10 Things”, where select team members share 10 facts about themselves! And, I just learned about something called Coffee Roulette: two people picked at random have a virtual coffee date for 15-30 minutes and if you submit a screenshot of your Coffee Roulette date, you’re entered to win some prizes! How awesome is that?
Emaan: Super cool! All in all, I’d say it’s been a pretty happy first few weeks at Happy Cog!
Maria: Agreed!
Written by Emaan Riaz and Maria Martinez