The journey of a Daylight intern

Internships at Daylight

Daylight has been lucky to be able to bring on interns from local coding boot camps these past few years.  Kevin and Ryan joining us from Epicodus was no exception.  Here’s a bit of Kevin’s experience navigating coding school and getting his feet under himself as a developer.

How it all started

I first tried to teach myself programming in 2015. I bought an HTML and CSS book to start, but I soon told myself this material is extremely difficult and impossible to learn and that only geniuses could learn how to program. So I decided that it wasn’t for me and the book collected dust.

Fast forward almost 3 years to the beginning of 2018, for whatever reason I tried to learn to programme once more. I don’t know why, but this time it clicked. It made sense and, more importantly, it was really fun. I blazed through the book and online tutorials and started going to meetups, which are where I learned about a scholarship program to help people pay for technical training, such as coding boot camps. I jumped on board and that is how I got started with going to Epicodus.

Coding Bootcamp

When I started Epicodus, a coding boot camp in downtown Portland, I was nervous but very excited. I felt really confident the first few weeks when we learned HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript. I even felt really good when we started learning a new technology, such as C#/.NET. But as we moved to harder concepts, I soon began to fear that this was too hard for me and that I was not good or smart enough. Imposter syndrome was setting in quickly.

Epicodus is big on having a growth mindset and that being the most important skill as a developer. With enough grit and determination, we can learn anything. So, I powered through and continued to try to learn whatever I could. Then something amazing happened, everything started to click again. Things started making sense and I understand now what was impossibly confusing before.

Confidence vs. Competence

This pattern continued to arise every time I tried to learn something new. I would enjoy it and easily learn the basic concepts and then get intimidated and struggle with the harder stuff. And after a lot of googling and headbanging, it starts making sense and I regain my confidence. This has happened when I learned:

• C#/.NET
• Angular
• React/Redux
• Vue/Vuex

And I am sure that this pattern will continue as I go on to learn more languages and frameworks. This can be seen in the following graph:

Interning at Daylight Studio

I just finished my program at Epicodus and am finishing up my internship at Daylight Studio, both of which were great experiences in which I learned a lot.

At Daylight, Ryan (the other Epicodus intern) and I worked on project Minerva.  Minerva is an application under development at Daylight which helps companies evaluate and compare their web presence against their competitors and market.  Our work concentrated on building the initial URL comparison groups and graphing information on websites’ performance, accessibility, and best practices.  We got to develop a good amount of experience in Vue, Vuex, and D3.  You can check it out here!

Moving Forward

I am continually trying to learn new technologies and review what I currently know. Right now, I am learning DNS and using domain names with cloud services such as AWS and also cementing my knowledge of React and Redux.

Moving forward I will be looking to become a front-end software engineer to be able to use the skills and technologies I have learned through my experience with Epicodus and Daylight Studio.