18 Jun Welcome 2020 Terafuze Interns
We are excited to be underway with our highly motivated interns this summer. Max Ward is a returning intern from last year and Ezno Saba is interning with us for the first time this summer. While this year will be a little different, as this is the first time we are implementing a virtual internship program, we are all adjusting to the new normal of how we work and live. At Terafuze, the health, safety and well being of our employees, interns and their families is our highest priority.
The 2020 Class
Max is a rising junior at William & Mary working on a double major in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Enzo is a rising junior in Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.
The 2020 Program
We have turned them loose on a new project that we’ve been wanting to pursue and we are looking forward to seeing how far they can get with it this summer. The project is an online donation management and tracking software for a non-profit organization named Zycle. Zycle provides bicycles to families and kids in need. Zycle provides this service with the belief that engaging in healthy activities, such as biking with friends and family and encourages a healthy lifestyle and strong relationships.
Besides accepting donations, the software will keep track of how the money for each donation is allocated and used so that the person who made the donation has visibility into exactly how their donation is used. We gave Max and Ezno the choice of developing a website or a mobile app. They chose to go with building a mobile app and have started working with the Ionic platform for mobile development. We’d also like to leverage Salesforce APIs as much as possible to provide most of the functionality. We (er, they) will need to develop the mobile app and likely will need to develop application-specific backend services perhaps with database access in addition to integrating with Salesforce APIs. This is not a throwaway or toy application. We fully intend to put it to work for the Zycle non-profit organization. Therefore, we need a CI/CD build pipeline in place. Max and Enzo will setup a CI/CD pipeline using AWS Code Pipeline and AWS Code Deploy.
It is satisfying and rewarding to us to be able to work with interns who are eager to learn and see them grow and learn quickly and work together as a team. We hope that they get a lot out of working with us this summer as well. In fact, we are encouraging them to work towards a certification this summer, such as the AWS Developer Associate Certification, or possibly a Salesforce certificate or possibly something else that they are interested in and that also relates to the work that they are doing this summer. They will also learn the core process steps of the Scrum process (as Max did last summer as well) such as sprint planning, standup meetings, and sprint reviews.
We have a lot of confidence in our interns and expect them to work together as a team and to be self-starters and to be ready and willing to learn on from each other and on their own. We also enjoy rolling up our sleeves and working directly with the interns ourselves as time permits. However, it is often hard for us to find more than a couple of hours to work directly with them per week, though that’s OK and perhaps good in some ways. They are energetic, responsible, mature adults who work best when we get out of their way and let them do what works for them, yet staying in touch to help shorten their learning curve, to provide some direction in terms of software development best practices and processes.
Welcome to our class of 2020 interns, and thank you in advance for your hard work, creative thinking, and can do attitude.