In conclusion of my second week, I am happy with my progress as I learn more about programming and web development. At the beginning of the week, my co-intern Tanner and I were assigned a project to work on to help our customers get a better view of their data. All of the skills from our courses at Point Park were put to use including programming concepts such as string manipulation and loops as well as what we learned in our database course.

Our day usually starts with scrum meetings where each member on our team discusses what they are working on and how we can move forward with all of our objectives. This is a great opportunity for me to listen attentively and learn about our processes to see how everything we are working on ties together. The rest of the day is spent working in conjunction with Tanner on researching and finding ways to implement our project over the course of the summer. This week was definitely our most “heavy duty” in terms of the skills required and the work we had to do. I frequently consulted with our more experienced developers and supervisor when issues came up and they were very helpful in explaining certain certain concepts so that we understood them going forward. For example, I learned a lot this week about native PHP methods, interfaces, polymorphism, and control flow. One of my favorite things about this job is that I am given enough independence to learn and do things on my own while still being able to seek out support when it is needed. This is the best way to grow into a new skill set in my opinion.

Although the work was challenging, I did not feel there was anything that I couldn’t learn and eventually overcome. I am moving closer to my goals of getting stronger in PHP and understanding the MVC pattern. Next week we will continue our project and hopefully have a good portion of our back-end program completed so we can start working on the view. If I had to rate myself, I would give myself a 4 since I feel like I did some good work but could have done better. All in all it was a very productive week.