Skills and technologies I had to learn for my internship

My Explore internship consists of two parts: Project Management and Software Engineering. I spent the first four weeks of my internship working with my team to develop a product specification for our project feature. This part of the internship required written and verbal communication skills to conduct customer interviews, develop possible user scenarios, and prototype the feature designs.

The Software development section of the internship required understanding the Hungarian coding style, industry-level C++, and how to use Source Depot for version control. Although I learned C++ in my Data Structures and Algorithms course, I took an accelerated introduction to C++ to refresh my understanding of the language and know the industry style of writing C++ code. My knowledge of C++ has helped me quickly understand the challenging and scaffolded parts of the codebase. At the start of my internship, it was hard to comprehend C++ code because of the different Hungarian prefixes used until I used various online resources that listed the meaning of different prefixes. After understanding the Hungarian coding style, it was a lot easier to understand how the code worked.

Furthermore, I learned how to use Source Depot as the version control system for our project. Source Depot is a non-distributed version control system with a central repository where different local changes are mapped. All changes are packed in change lists before publishing them in a code review and then submitted for syncing into the main repository. It has been a great experience using a different version control system beyond git.

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