Starting out on my summer internship – Week 1

My first week with the iSolutions Technical Innovation and Developments team was an interesting start to my 12 week internship here. With the team in the early stages of two new projects, there was little for me to contribute straight off the bat besides a small amount of requirements capture and some wire frame drawing. Instead, I took the opportunity to get to grips with some of the new technologies I’ll be using for the next three months. I’ve never gotten very involved with web development and database frameworks, but the tools I’ve been investigating have proven themselves to be more simple (and dare I say fun?) than I had anticipated.

Firstly I re-familiarised myself with .NET. C# was was one of my first programming languages, taught to me for my computing A level, and whilst the iSolutions projects I’ve seen are much more complex than any of my A level courseworks, it still feels friendly and familiar coming back to it. Building upon that basic knowledge of .NET, I then learnt about code first entity frameworks from David, and began working on online tutorials to create an MVC entity framework based web application.

Naturally, my first week also exposed me to some web design, starting with a talk from Chris. This talk was a test run for a web conference next month, and was aimed at people with little to no experience with the technical side of the web at all. Whilst I come from a technical background, I’d never done web development before, so the front end web development side of the talk taught me a lot. Delving into online tutorials on the topic, I started to really enjoy playing around with html and css.

I’m excited to see where the team’s two new projects will go when they start to take off, and to use some of my newly learnt skills to contribute towards them.