Ishmam Fardin

College: City College

Education Level: Junior

Career Interest: Senior Engineer

I am currently a junior at City College majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Business Administration. I consider myself a writer and someone who's heavily invested in learning and growth. Writing brings more clarity, helps find gap in knowledge, and scale what I know to help others. Part of those qualities, is what also made me interested in technology, where I have the ability to write solutions that can impact millions of people. My goal is to become someone who can leave his mark wherever he goes, become someone who paves the path for new innovations, someone reliable to those around him and those using his work (code, writing, etc).

What was your role?

I Created a documentation web application (python mkdocs) to streamline onboarding processes, provide codebase walkthrough, advice, and reference to how to use tech stack. Developed functions using PHP and AJAX to help frontend team communicate with the backend, from retrieving necessary data to submitting data. Worked on implementing a new analytics framework to get data on user interactions with the site. Frontend elements such as displaying certain information depending on what data the user has using Javascript, Jquery, HTML/CSS

What did you work on?

Helped develop the backend aspects for Unadat site along with a walkthrough guide for others and other incoming interns to help with coding.

What was the impact of your project?

What did you learn or improve on from this internship or from your teammates?

I learned to think from a user perspective, such as checking if certain user inputs would be accepted at login or what basic user interaction does something that it is not supposed to. I got a better understanding of what edge cases to look out for and take into account for when building future applications that requires user inputs. I also learned to check if theres a function that can re-used and maybe slightly adjusted when implementing a solution so that I would not have to do repeated work.

What skills have you gained?

I cultivated my technical skills by employing PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML/CSS, and Jquery which gave me the opportunity to work on frontend and backend. I picked up how to communicate my ideas and understanding through collaboration and writing. I got more familiarity with tools like Google Cloud, MySQL workbench, and Git. I also cultivated a lot of teamwork during the internship, from merge conflicts to getting people up to speed with new technology to working together to create solutions.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

Biggest roadblock was being lost at the beginning, when I was exposed to the huge codebase and found no resources to navigate through it.which lowered my confidence and increased anxiety. To overcome, I initially started with mentioning to Dan that I was lost and asked how previous interns were during this time. He reassured me and told me I am at where 99% of where previous interns were , which made me feel less out of place. I then took initiative to make the most of what I have, going through the relevant files and understanding how they work together, the purpose of each file / function, and researching what I did not know - which took a lot of time but gave me familiarity with the codebase making future work a lot easier.

How has company culture guided your work?

The company culture allowed me to take ownership and initiative with creating the documentation and completing my work in a timely fashion. Everyone is very communicative and open to conversations so it allowed me to ask questions , let people know if I was lost, and raise awareness to any issues I was having.

What was your experience at Unadat?

What was one big project you worked on during the internship? Can you walk me through the process?

What advice would you give to future interns?

Over-communicate, If you feel like you are not meeting your learning objectives or feeling lost, talk about it with Dan or Sean. It may feel uncomfortable, but Sean & Dan are very open to help and flexible and it will allow you to get to where you want quicker. People would not know your state of mind and context behind your issues, so communication is key to bringing your problems and understanding to light giving others a chance to help you.