Over the summer months, we’ve been blessed to have had three incredible interns with us at Dharmafly – two new graduates and one first-going-on-second year student, all from the University of Brighton’s School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics.
We’ve been creating new tools and experimental applications in our little future retro spacepod at the Lab for the Recently Possible, at the top of The Dock in Brighton & Hove. In the process, everyone’s been learning a whole lot more about application engineering, open source software, JavaScript, API design, Node.js, Git, and more than anything else, about what it takes to steer a project from idea to implementation, working with others along the way.
Aaron Acerboni and Chris Newton, the two graduates, have been regulars at Async (the fortnightly JavaScript meetup in Brighton that we run) for a couple of years. They joined as freshers, overcoming some initial concern that it’d all be too much, but ultimately finding it all quite humane and supportive! After some time, Aaron started joining Dharmafly for a day a week, in between university lectures, to learn and create open source web apps. When we started up the Lab, Chris joined Aaron for what was now two days of coding explorations per week.
A first-year student, Adam Yeats, started coming along to Async and our series of Node.js Lab Days. Soon enough, Adam joined Aaron and Chris programming at the Lab. Adam was super keen to take on an internship over the summer and, although we hadn’t hosted any such programmes before, this feels like the time to try new things, so we took the plunge. I invited all three to co-create Dharmafly’s summer internship scheme. And what a fine thing it has been.
The internship programme was paid and ran for three days a week (with an optional fourth day for anyone who just couldn’t stay away), for two and a half months over the summer of 2012. Over this time, Aaron, Chris and Adam have truly blossomed, gaining deeper skills for software production – in programming, engineering, project management, idea development, collaboration and so much more.
The blog posts that follow over the next few days are some of the reflections and experiences that our interns have had during the programme, followed by the release of some of their creations.
UPDATE: the blog posts
- Git and GitHub – by Aaron
- Work that doesn’t suck – by Chris
- Making tools for the job – by Aaron
- Coding for a reason – by Chris
- My experience this summer – by Adam
Subscribe by feed
Subscribe by email
@dharmafly