Mentorship and Growth: Reflecting on My Bitlab Experience

My Bitlab internship

Completed a 7-month backend developer internship at Bitlab, focusing on API development with .NET Core, Umbraco, and MS SQL Server, while also working with Azure, Azure Synapse, PHP, and Drupal.

What I like about my internship experience

• Exposure to entire end to end process of development, from requirements - planning - development - UAT - deployment and maintenance
• Learnt invaluable knowledge on managing work, communicating with other teammates whether developers, business analysts or my bosses
• At the last month I had the chance to work with junior interns where I was able to guide them and mentor them through the tasks and challenges they face.
• I was also given the chance to communicate with clients through training calls and email messages

Challenges that I met during my internship

I think a key challenge would be switching from a project to another especially if the project I switch to already has some development taken place, it's hard to understand the context and manage the tasks for the new project, for example Data Lake tasks where quite challenging especially at the start as I didn't have the context that the previous developer may have had, so because of that it took me quite an extensive period of time to simply try to understand the interrelated parts of the project

Some problems faced during development where hard and I had to think from different perspectives and try new methods or approaches that may not have been planned for for example during the UN SDG gateway, I had to reinvent the wheel for the upload data features, by completely ditching the current approach of the upload which uses an external library and switch to local php language approaches, while there are alot of reasoning for this, the result was an optimized and a stable outcome

Challenges are inevitable, and I’m grateful for those I encountered during this internship because they helped me grow and level up my skills. I also appreciate the patience my supervisors showed along the way.

What I learned from my internship

• Gained exposure to the entire end-to-end development process, from gathering requirements and planning to UAT, deployment, and maintenance.
• Developed strong work management and communication skills by collaborating with developers, business analysts, and clients.
• Learned to navigate the challenge of switching projects with pre-existing codebases, which enhanced my ability to quickly understand complex, interrelated systems.
• Improved client communication skills through participation in training calls and email correspondence.
• Had the opportunity to mentor new interns, guiding them through various tasks and challenges.

My advice for internship

My advice for other interns is to always ask questions and remain curious. Keep learning relentlessly and let your hunger for knowledge guide you. Don’t worry about asking questions - even if they seem basic and never leave assumptions unchecked. Learn at your own pace and give yourself the time to process new information; after all, that’s how the human brain works.