Week 6. Post 2.

 What types of projects or assignments did you complete in your internship? What were their purposes?

The types of assignments we have been working on vary: starting from the environment and port setups and ending with full-stack web development. For example, one of the tasks that we had to work on is creating a new view/controller in our search index that will display all (and if not all, some) of the information we have in our Solr database for a chosen record. Where this new page should have been formatted to have the 'standard' search index header/footer. The final goal, in the long run, was to make all our entries in the search index to be found by Google and indexed in google scholar.

My reaction to this assignment was very exciting - I truly enjoyed building something the result of which I can see being functional on a web page. I was very happy to finally work on both the front-end and back-end at the same time and see how different classes, files, and controllers interconnect with each other to produce the records in a JSON format on a web page. 

The insight I had from this assignment is that it seems like I enjoy web application development. Before coming to this internship, part of my question to myself was: "Is software engineering something I want to do in the future? What if I am not going to enjoy it?" etc. Because of these doubts, I could not fully enjoy the process of coding, always thinking that maybe it is not for me. However, after working on this assignment and a couple of others, I realized that I enjoy seeing the product of my code in a real-life application and I like the process of building it as well. I realized that I would not enjoy working on something that I do not see as a real-life application. In the future, I would try not to be prejudiced about some job before trying it out fully and try not to let the doubts prevent me from enjoying the work. I will try to make sure I have the right mindset before starting any job and free my mind from the blockers.