Our internship program 2022, part 1
This week we finished our first internship of 2022 for FP students in The Canary Islands from CIFP Majada Marcia, IES El Rincón, CIFP Villa de Agüimes and Ilerna.
Congratulations Aridane, Lucas, Iriome, Oliver and Mohamed, it’s been a blast!
We’ve been running our internship for four years now and it has been an extremely successful program with all our interns now working as developers, and many with us. Each year though, we review the program and adapt it based on feedback, and this year has been a little different to previous academies. This year we’ve introduced developer shadowing and increased the involvement of our team and we think it has made our great internship program even better.
Our internship program 2022
Week 1 – onboarding
All our developers participated in an intense one week onboarding where they learnt about Secret Source, our history, our processes and met many of our team. They were also introduced to psychological safety and how to build ownership skills.
Weeks 2 -5 – The Academy
Led by Ted, our CTO, our interns learnt all the skills not usually taught at school but absolutely essential for any junior developer role. This included:
- Scrum / Agile
- Netiquette
- HTML, CSS, and JS best practices
- Using source control (gitflow / feature branches, writing good commit messages)
- Writing tasks, user stories and acceptance criteria
- Writing tests
- Common coding design patterns
- Creating pull requests and doing code reviews
In short, working as a team rather than struggling as an individual
And of course they participated in our intensive English lessons.
Ted gave many of the classes but this year, many of our wider team participated too with Miron teaching Scrum and Agile, Ruymán CSS (Flexbox), Pablo gave classes on testing and Nayra on interviewing techniques and how to get a job. In addition, all our interns shadowed a developer in the company and sat in on stand ups, retros and sprint planning meetings to see what Agile is like in a real team.
Weeks 6-10 – The Project
The project the interns worked on consisted of a frontend in React and a backend in Ruby on Rails, with a machine learning component (a model) created with Fast.ai. The interns created the frontend from scratch and participated in testing the backend created by existing Secret Source staff.
With the final version of the application, users can take pictures of common construction machinery and vehicles to find out what kind of training is required to operate the vehicles in the UK.
The project is an essential part of the internship where our interns not only learn a technology (React) but they also learn how to work in a real development environment. They got to practise writing user stories, user acceptance criteria and tasks. They learnt how to design a test platform and how to write individual tests and how to use GIT as a team. This year, existing members of Secret Source also worked with the interns reviewing their user stories and tasks, performing code reviews and guiding them along the way.
Week 10 – Presentation
After finishing the project all the intern team presented their project to the Secret Source team as a whole. They got experience of planning a presentation and public speaking skills.
Having previously only worked with ULPGC students, this year we started a dedicated internship for FP students in The Canaries and it has been an overwhelming success. But … don’t take our word for it , here are a few words from this year’s graduates.
“My experience was great, I reviewed my knowledge and learned new web technologies that I never used before. They gave me time to perform the different activities without stress.”
““Mi experiencia en Secret Source ha sido totalmente enriquecedora. El planteamiento de las prácticas es genuinamente para beneficiarnos para progresar en nuestro desarrollo como desarrolladores. Se aprende a ser un correcto desarrollador tanto en las hard skills como en las soft skills. Es una empresa que prima la calidad en todos los aspectos. Asimismo, el ambiente es acogedor y distendido, con unas buenas instalaciones. “My experience was great, I reviewed my knowledge and learned new web technologies that I never used before. They gave me time to perform the different activities without stress.”
“Being an intern at Secret Source is an amazing thing. We have been learning how to work together as a team using AGILE methodologies in a real life project. We felt part of the company from the very first moment and if there’s any possibility to work with them in the future I won’t hesitate on taking it. Secret Source is a great company to work for.”
“Secret Source allows me to learn how to work in a professional team, not only on the technical part but more importantly, I had the chance to learn how to organise the job and create the tasks according to the agile scrum methodology and improve my communication skills. The people at Secret Source made me feel like part of the family and made my time as an intern an incredible experience.”
