Summer Internships 2015 Finale
After three intense months, full of hard work and heap of new experience for both, us and interns, it is time to close our Summer Internship Programme. As they say, all good things must come to an end. It has been an exciting adventure and a big challenge for a young company in its first year of operations.
We are extremely pleased and proud of what our interns have achieved and learned. It has been incredibly developing time for the whole company. We can say with clear consciousness that we are building the best team on the planet and now we can expand it with another great members joining us.
Our internship program was divided into three parts. During the first one, we conducted a series of trainings. We started with light introduction to PHP programming language, as our interns had various backgrounds, mostly Java and .NET. We quickly convinced them that PHP is not what they constantly hear about and what we do is the “new PHP style”. Then we covered general Object-Oriented-Programming principles - Clean Code, DRY, KISS, Object Calisthenics. The best way to practice these was through Behavior-Driven-Development with PHPSpec. Before that, we of course taught everyone how to use XDebug for debugging PHP. All these topics started with lectures from our developers and then our students were tasked with exercises. Naturally, after SpecBDD, we introduced Behat. In our opinion this was one of the most ground-breaking topics because they had to completely change their mindset about developing business applications. After few weeks of rocking with PHP and BDD, it was time to learn our framework of choice - Symfony. We started with short presentations and exercises about individual components and then they implemented a small shopping cart application with full-stack Symfony. It was exciting to see all these things they have learned finally come together, but that was only the beginning.
The second part was the most exciting. We presented Agile philosophy, talked about Scrum and Kanban, another big things to learn. Next step was the killer-aspect of our program - we created 2 Scrum teams, with dedicated Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Team Leaders and 3 Developers (interns) each. Our goal was to simulate the way we work with real clients and try to show them what it is like to work with us. It has been also a great opportunity to polish our processes and to experiment. Michał and Paweł have come up with “fake” business ideas, prepared logos, specifications and feature descriptions in Gherkin. We completed full 4 Scrum Sprints and then switched to Kanban workflow for bug fixes and site maintenance mode. And you know what? We were surprised with the results. We managed to complete and release two fully functional MVPs - Art auction house system and Library management application. The overall quality of the application and code surpassed our expectations and proved that our methodologies, together with code review culture, allows us to deliver high business value through our software.
Last part of the internship was about giving our students a taste of Open Source. They started contributing to Sylius documentation and fixing some small issues in the system. We think they got bit by this awesome bug of OSS!
After internship we asked our interns how did they like it. We received tremendously positive feedback. They praised whole workflow and atmosphere in the office, but we are most satisfied with the answer for the question about best thing they learned. Separately, all 6 interns said: BDD with Behat and phpspec! That confirmed our belief it is worthwhile to devote time for spreading good practices and methodologies. Thanks to that we have shaped really promising programmers.
Indeed, it was immensely busy time but don’t you dare think that we forgot how to have fun. We started Internship with integration meeting in bowling alley, eating pizzas and drinking beers, and we ended it together at the first PHPers meetup in our city (which was organized by Lakion’s Sylwia, Paweł and Michał) also with good food and drinks! ;)
Last day of the internship our interns surprised us with delicious cake and gave us diplomas for best bosses, best tutors and awesome support. It was such a kind gesture and it is nice to know that they enjoyed that time as much as we did. Thank you guys, we were happy to have you as our interns.
We are proud to announce that 4 of our interns will continue working with us as true members of Lakion Team! Congratulations Ania, Magda, Janek and Arek! Welcome on board!