Concepta's Software Eng. internship 2022

 One of my internship goals was to learn about the end-to-end software engineering process from understanding the problem to testing the solution. Last week I met a major milestone in achieving this goal by completing an engineering design document and organizing a meeting with ten engineers in my team to review the document. An engineering design document elaborates the engineering approach and testing of the different tasks in the project. My initial understanding of a design document was a detailed explanation of the engineering approach I planned to follow for my project. So, it was very hard to come up with a design document during the first weeks of my internship because I did not understand the codebase enough to suggest a detailed approach. This held me behind a bit because I spent so much time trying to get an end-to-end understanding of how to implement the project. Although my manager had insisted on not coding until a design document is reviewed, I found it impossible...

I expected to have done a big amount of coding for my internship project by the sixth week. I feel disappointed that I have not hit my initial expectations of finishing the core parts of my internship project by the sixth week before I work on the stretch goals. What has held me back from achieving my goal? First, my internship project will be the first time my team’s core feature will be extended on mobile clients like Microsoft Teams and Outlook. This meant that I had no one on my team to directly contact about mobile application development for the product. Additionally, it meant I had no similar implementation of our feature on a mobile client that I could use as a reference point. I have spent so much time trying to find contacts on other teams who are able to help. Gladly, I found some engineers in the Microsoft offices in China and Norway that are currently working on projects that I can leverage for my internship project. This has helped me overcome the challenge of working o...

  My strongest attributes in my internship have been my ability to debug new and unknown code and  communicate with other engineers about my project. Surprising as it might sound, I have not written any new code in my internship. I have spent the last five weeks looking through the existing code and trying to understand how the feature I will be contributing to works. I have spent my time during the last five weeks debugging different errors I had when setting up my build environment. Some of the errors I got were unique and required longer debugging sessions or reaching out to engineers outside my team for help. I leveraged the written and verbal communication skills to craft my emails or Teams messages to the engineers. I got more help when I concisely explained my challenge, different attempts I had tried to solve the error, and questions I had about the error. After setting up my development environment, I set up different meetings with full-time employees who had or are...

One skill I am learning a lot from my internship is the importance of forming connections with fellow interns and employees beyond work. This is my first in-person internship and the company’s first in-person summer internship since the outbreak of COVID-19. There are so many social activities organized for interns in different organizations within Microsoft to meet and network with each other. I am part of a cohort of over twelve interns in various teams who meet weekly to play games, solve puzzles, go on kayaking trips, and do other fun activities. Having such fun activities embedded into my internship experience is helping me take breaks between work to get re-energized alongside meeting students from different schools. Additionally, organized social activities are forcing me to push beyond my introverted self to connect with people more. An event I enjoyed at the start of my internship was a team building event where my organization took all interns and full-time employees for a ...

  I have spent most of my time this week debugging different parts of the Android code for Microsoft Teams. I was required to spend time understanding how the new feature would fit in to existing Teams Mobile code since my internship project adds a new feature to Microsoft Teams Android and iOS clients. I spent the last two weeks organizing meetings with engineers that have worked on Teams Mobile to understand the codebase structure, how to test the different components of Teams Mobile, and ask questions about the technologies used to build the application. My experience from teamwork in Computer Science at Berea helped me to know when to reach out for help and how to develop good questions that get helpful answers. A specific example is the Database Management systems course, which was a service-learning course, that I took last semester. This course consisted of a seven-week project where I worked in a team of five students to develop a search page for Feeding Kentucky. The pro...

  I am in the fourth week of my internship. I had hoped to have the foundational parts of my project implemented at this time in my internship. It has been disappointing to notice how I am not making as much progress as I had hoped. I spent the first two weeks installing the project environments and setting them up. Then, I spent the third week trying a test project to ensure all my project environments were working before I started implementing the initial parts of my project. I am required to develop an engineering design document before implementing more than ten percent of my project. I had a very bad day yesterday after evaluating my progress and the internship requirements; I am not on track to hitting some of the project deadlines. However, it was encouraging to know that it is not too late to resolve this challenge. I had a self-evaluation time at work today where I analyzed some of the causes of my slow progress which includes setting up multiple development environments...

  My team is working on an already existing feature that is available on Desktop and online clients. My internship project will be the first time this feature is added to Android and iOS clients. Being the first person on the team doing android development means that most of the engineers on my direct team have not developed for mobile clients. Furthermore, it means I must reach out to engineers working on other teams that develop for mobile endpoints. One important aspect of my internship is knowing who and how to ask questions. I spent this week reading through Java code to understand how a feature that has a similar experience to my project’s feature. I found the debugging skills I learned at Berea very helpful because I easily added breakpoints to the code and stepped in or out of different parts of the code to understand the function calls. I developed questions of different parts of the codebase that I did not understand and asked my engineering mentor. My mentor and I figu...

  Microsoft’s mission is “to empower all people on the earth to achieve more.” In an attempt to achieve this mission, Microsoft values Innovation, Diversity and Inclusion, Racial equity initiative, corporate social responsibility, Artificial Intelligence, and Trustworthy computing. I think Microsoft’s most important value is Diversity and Inclusion which the organization has encouraged through engaging diverse customer feedback and supporting inclusive teams during product development. All employees and interns hold periodic evaluations where we reflect on our progress and set new goals for the upcoming period. One thing I noticed is that all employees are required to mention at least one way they commit to promoting diversity and inclusion in their teams. I found this interesting because requiring every employee mention their contribution to Microsoft’s diversity and Inclusion commitment allowed many employees learn about different social groups and actively reflect on individua...

  In my first semester at Berea, I took an Android phone application development course that was a project-based and student-led course between Berea and Codepath organization. This experience directly relates to my current internship since my project will contain a component of building an Android application using Java. Although I did not take a course that mainly used Java programming language, the projects I worked on in the Android development course helped me practice applying Java to mobile application development. Also, I have not found it hard to understand how different parts of the codebase work because Java is an Object-Oriented programming language like C++ which I used for my Data Structures and Algorithms course and in my internship project last summer. One new aspect of the Java code in my project codebase if that there are more access modifiers than in C++. Access modifiers are a set of keywords that specify where data or methods are accessible in a program. For ex...

A picture of Omotola Elujulo and me.  Omotola is a fellow intern in OneDrive and SharePoint This week I had lunch with my mentors, manager, and project teammates from my last internship. It was exciting to meet them in-person, catch up on what everyone has done in the last year, and receive recommendations about the different fun activities in Washington state. One of my goals this summer, in addition to working on my project, is to make and build networks with different interns and full-time employees at Microsoft. I am happy to have my third internship with Microsoft in-person because it will allow me to meet more people in the office and at different Microsoft events. I found it challenging to build one-to-one connections during virtual internships. Over the last two weeks in office, I have connected with a lot more people than all the connections I made in last summer’s internship. One major advantage of being physically present at the office is working in the same time as most...

Today, I had a coffee chat with a full-time software engineer in OneDrive and SharePoint. In preparation for the coffee chat, I checked the engineer’s profile through the internal Microsoft account portal and wrote some questions to guide our conversation. Spending some time preparing for the chat helped me to reflect on software engineering practices and Microsoft culture I wanted to learn about from the coffee chat. Also, I was interested in how project tasks evolve during a software engineer’s time at Microsoft because I noticed that the engineer was a Software Engineer level 2, which means that they have worked on various projects. During our introduction phase of the chat, the engineer mentioned how she had attained three promotions in about three years, which was fast and surprising progress. From this I was curious to know what she attributed to this progress. I expected her to mention how she worked on very difficult projects that impressed her boss. But I was shocked when th...

  I have previously done two internships in Microsoft, one as a New Technologist intern and another as an Explore intern with Microsoft Excel. During these experiences, I found it hard to understand the hierarchy within different teams, especially knowing who to ask different kinds of questions. However, after these internships, I understood how teams are organized and the people responsible different parts of my project. For example, the roles of my internship recruiter are totally different from the roles of my engineering manager or engineering mentor. Through understanding these roles, I have gained insight on the person to ask different kinds of questions and known what to expect from my conversations with the stakeholders in my internship. Additionally, understanding the specific roles of leaders in my organization has helped me better prepare when I have coffee chats or meetings with them because I am better prepared with relevant questions. Another past experience that ha...