Changes to my internship goals

It has been a month since the start of my internship. This week we completed our work with the Project management aspect of the project. We concluded with a specification review session where different project managers reviewed our feature specification and gave us feedback about the different scenarios to consider and changes we should make to our feature plan.

While preparing our project management specification, I enjoyed how different project managers were bouncing ideas off each other and the great insights they suggested for our project’s success. As a result, I want to learn more about project management because it is a field that I might want to work in for some time. Working through the process also made me appreciate the impact of thoughtful project management on understanding the different project requirements. Additionally, I think a good software developer is one with a product manager mentality, always keeping the customer needs at the core of the products developed. From the projects I have worked on, I always prioritize the engineering complexity of the project features without considering the impact of the project and the community challenge solved.

Although I initially hadn’t planned to learn more about product management, moving forward with my internship, I plan to talk to full-time product managers to learn more about product management. I also plan to utilize my product management mentors to learn more about what they do and the resources I can use to learn about how to identify solutions to customer pain points. Finally, I also plan to talk to Product management interns to learn more about product management and the different projects they are working on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Software test engineering career

During the last two weeks, I talked to a couple of full-time employees to learn how Microsoft tests its software and a career option as a Software Test Engineer. Test engineers write software tests like unit tests, sub-system tests, scenario tests, and vendor tests. Unit tests are tests written to check how different functions or methods work at the lowest level of abstraction. During a conversation with a former Test engineer, I learned about Test-driven development, where test suites are developed before the actual development of the product. Although test-driven development is highly encouraged, some engineers write tests to verify their product's functionality after the coding. One importance of Test-driven development is fully understanding various edge cases to consider while developing. Sub-system tests are tests written to cover code shared between different components. A specific type of sub-system testing called cross-platform testing verifies how code behaves on other E...
Read more

Learning source Depot

 I remember asking my manager about the technology used in Microsft Excel projects and what skills would support me during my internship experience. I was glad to know that the primary programming language we would use was C++; however, I was surprised that we would use a new version system called source depot, which is different from Git. Source Depot was a completely different source control that I needed to read about before my internship. My primary goals were to learn how to commit, push, pull, and merge changes and the similarities and differences between Git and Source Depot that I can leverage when researching Source depot.  Unlike Git, a distributed system with local and remote repositories, source depot is a centralized version control system with a central repository and client mappings to that repository. Another significant difference is how Git has terminal and graphical user interfaces(GUI) options, but Source depot is accessed through the Command-line option. W...
Read more

Lesson from overcoming a challenge

 I spent most of the week reviewing comments on my code review and preparing for demo presentations of the end-to-end customer experience of our feature. During my last demo presentation, I remembered how overwhelmed I felt during my first week at the internship. Everything from understanding my project description, adjusting to work in Pacific Standard time when physically located in Berea, and trying to understand the meaning of the C++ code in Excel's codebase seemed a lot to understand. By taking one task at a time and reaching out to my mentors and manager whenever I needed help to understand something, I overcame my technical and non-technical challenges. One major challenge I faced during my internship was executing my second project task. My task was to enable customers to navigate to a specific sheet and cell in Microsoft Excel using deep linking. To deep-link to the customer's cell location, I worked with code from the front and back end of SharePoint's server, wh...
Read more