An internship milestone I have so far achieved

 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 to fully understand the effect of changing certain code in a new codebase without coding and debugging. However, one important thing that helped me prepare a good design document was the different meetings I organized with Microsoft teams that have worked on similar projects like mine or work in Microsoft Teams. These meetings helped me answer the biggest question for my design document: Whether to build react-native or purely native components for my feature. Also, these interviews also helped me find contacts that I can reach out during the implementation phase of my project.

Although I still had open questions after my design document, one major importance of the document was to help me understand my project timeline better because I broke my project tasks into smaller sub tasks that are more achievable. Looking back, I should have spent less time trying to get a “perfect” approach in the design document. Afterall, my manager and team were more interested in a general approach, than the specifics, to see how to support me through my internship.