A Day in the Life of Our Engineering Interns

This article kicks off a series of posts produced by the aptLearn Engineering interns, highlighting their experiences and the projects they worked on this Fall 2022.

A Day in the Life of Our Engineering Interns

Interns are integral members of our team — not only do they provide a fresh perspective, but they also bring in lots of energy and vigor to help grow the company. Early October, aptLearn welcomed two wonderful interns to the web development team. Let us get to know more about Covenant Adebisi and Toyyib Lawal through this interview.

Why did you choose to intern at aptLearn?

Covenant: As a developer, I always love challenges, so having the opportunity to join as an intern at aptLearn to solve some potential problems was really a great joy for me. I got to know about aptLearn on twitter, and getting to see the impact the platform had on upcoming techies, I made a conscious decision to join the team and equally try as much as possible to assist upcoming techies achieve their goal.

Toyyib: I applied for the internship to gain the experience of working with a team. I’ve worked on several projects individually, but aptLearn was my first step at working with other devs.

In which team do you work? Also, tell us more about your daily tasks and the project you’re working on.

Covenant: I work in the development team. We’re currently working on an IDE project. An IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, and is basically a tool used to code, run and debug codes. Currently, we are looking forward to implementing over 18 languages including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Our daily tasks are implementing new updates every week, fixing bugs and attending various meetings.

Toyyib: I work with the developer team, where we’re currently working on developing an in-browser IDE for aptLearn.

Tell us about your typical day at aptLearn.

Covenant: My day at aptLearn typically starts at 10am. I check the team chat platform for any updates, tasks or meetings for the day. If there are meetings, I schedule and add it to my to-do list for the day. Next, I login to the server and take the time to observe if there are no issues of any kind, and if there are none, then I go ahead to complete tasks or implement new updates to the system backend. I sometimes call for an emergency meeting with my team if I need something done quickly, then at the end of the day, I give a report of what was done for the day.

Toyyib: Usually, it starts with a team meeting where tasks, corrections and guides are being given, and then, I take the day to work on my given task, make research if needed to be able to complete the task assigned to me. At the end of the day, I submit a report of my activities on the required channel.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Covenant: I get my inspiration mainly from Twitter. I love Twitter and I do see a lot of designs/features which can be of good use to users/consumers of aptLearn. I’m also a good friend of Google and YouTube.

Toyyib: Where I get inspiration…YouTube and Stack Overflow.

Tell us about the challenges you’re facing here and what you’ve enjoyed the most during your internship.

Covenant: I work a 9 – 5 job because of the ASUU strike, so I’m not always available because of tasks from the job. Also, as a student resuming school soon, I’m going to face the challenge of multi-tasking school stuff and other jobs. During the internship, I’ve enjoyed the freedom of working at my own pace, though on a timeframe; having the freedom of working without being rushed or stressed is lovely.

Toyyib: One of the first and greatest challenge I’ve had so far while interning with aptLearn was the issue with working with teams which is because I’m not used to it, the code clashing,  additional knowledge of some git issues one might face and so on. However, with time, I was able to overcome these challenges.

What do you know now that you didn’t know before?

Covenant: A lot of things I didn’t know were revealed during my internship. I’ve  found my way around using a Plesk server, in depth exploration on WordPress web development, Linux system modification, amongst many other things.

Toyyib: Well as I mentioned earlier I learnt to work with teams; making my code more readable to other developers to understand since I’m not working alone. I’ve also gained knowledge on how the server works, and my interest in learning a new language which is PHP.

Has the internship met your expectations?

Covenant: We’re just one month in, but the internship has quite met my expectations. Looking forward to more.

Toyyib: No, not yet. I believe there is still much I’m expecting before the end of the internship.

Would you recommend the internship programme at aptLearn? What are your future plans after the internship?

Covenant: Yeah, I would recommend the internship programme at aptLearn. My future plans after the internship will be to work for aptLearn (if possible). Also, I wish to scale a tech startup with a team.

Toyyib: Yes, I very much will recommend it. I would also love to work full-time to keep the motivation on, and also be able to work on community projects which I believe is my greatest takeaway from this internship. I’ve been given the privilege to work on live projects that will be useful for the community rather than personal projects that seldom go live or make impact. 

Any Final Words?

Covenant: The internship at aptLearn has been really impactful; working with an amazing team, meeting new people, sharing and implementing ideas, debugging a lot more. It has really been an awesome experience, and I would really love it if we could actually have a hangout with everyone as proposed by the CEO.

Toyyib: I hope to learn more before the end of the internship program, that’s all. Thanks.