The Placement!

It’s been quite a year so far! Almost 5 months ago, I was sitting in my lecture theatre, just scrolling hopefully through my emails. I saw the words on the preview read “Thank you again for taking the time to…” and I got pretty scared. Opening it up to the words “We’d love to offer you a placement” was a relief at all of my work that led me up to that point.

Those who know me, know that I’ve always been into Computer Science, since Primary School. I loved Scratch, loved learning about loops, functions then classes in Python up to college. Over covid lockdown I was learning React and Luau. In University, I took my first steps towards fullstack, learning about Express.js and now .NET.

This didn’t mean I felt anything near secure leading up to the placement. I reached out to a company I worked with for my T-Level placement hours, and they kindly offered to let me do a month there in June, before I started at Cold Banana. If there's one big thing I’ve learnt this year, it's that you don’t get it if you don’t ask.

With them, I learnt about pull requests, code reviews and how to properly use AI in the code base. I learnt about using AGENTS.md and how to first plan then build it. Thank you to the team there, as the biggest take away for me there was how modern companies work in the industry.

Due to this, in the lead up to the first week, as I handed in my resignation to McDonalds and hyped myself up, I felt much more confident. A company doesn’t expect more than effort from an intern. As long as you’re willing to get stuck in, you don’t need to know everything, or much at all.

The first week pulled around, and I walked up to the front door not knowing what to expect. After some time to admire my desk, I was given a tour of the facilities, then got started with setup. Right next to me were the last year's placement students, telling me about their experiences and helping me with any setup.

Day two was a few more pieces of setup, then straight into learning about Umbraco and razor. And as someone who had never just done a straight HTML and CSS site before, it was pretty confusing. Past experience was with React and Tailwind. Learning the fundamentals has been great, but mixing in a CMS as well. Well its a lot!

The rest of the week, I spent working on this. The goal was to make a form that started details in the Umbraco backoffice and sent an email. Seeing how easy it was to make a form that sent an email was pretty eye opening.

It’s now the end of my first week, and luckily we have early finishes on Friday, giving me time to write this. I’ve already learnt so much! I’m very excited to see who or what I become by the end of this year.