Summer Internship - João Magalhães

Every Summer when university classes end, I try not to waste all my vacations by learning a new programming language or starting a small personal project. The final result usually ends in a folder most likely never to be opened again. This year, I decided to approach this problem differently and applied to a Summer internship at Whitesmith. I was very happy to know that I had been accepted. Not only I was going to learn new stuff but I would contribute to a meaningful project.

I spent my two month internship working on Qold, a Whitesmith product to monitor cold chains. I was assigned to this project since I showed interest in web development and was trusted to develop features for the product website. I was involved in adding functionalities such as internationalisation (support for multiple idioms), PDF reports generation, asynchronous email dispatch and most significantly the API that powers the iOs application - which can be found in App Store.

Since I never had any experience with ruby on rails, one of my main challenges was to learn it in a short period of time – both syntax and good practices - so that I could be able to start digging into the project. Aside from Rails framework, I’ve also learned how to use Heroku infrastructure and tools like git or CircleCi. The challenges become very easy to overcome with the help of my mentor Diogo and other colleagues, that guided me and made the learning curve a very small one.

The overall experience was very rewarding. I learned a lot in only two months and I believe that I’m now a much better prepared to integrate other software projects. I recommend any informatics engineering student to do an internship in a software company before finishing the bachelor/master’s degree. And if you’re deciding which company to apply for, you’ll find at Whitesmith a great and very friendly work environment with extra events like lunch-and-learn where we all order food and get to learn from the other coworkers about a specific topic.

I wish the best to Whitesmith with some special care to the Qold team. Many thanks for the awesome experience.

João Magalhães