Challenges and disappointments I have experienced in my internship

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 on a novel project that my teammates might have little experience with.

Second, I spent a lot of time setting up and debugging my development environments than my mentor and manager had anticipated. Since my project intersects two organizations, I had to set up more than development environment for the different parts of the project. Each environment had different instructions, required different supporting tools, and had different levels of engineering support to help me debug the challenges I had. Although it took me long to find solutions to this challenge, I utilized different Teams channels dedicated for Engineering support to ask questions about the bugs I was having. This helped me successfully set up my development environments and perform some code tracing to prepare my engineering design document.

Despite these challenges, I prepared an engineering design document that I will present to my team on Monday. The document outlines my engineering approach for the project and after it is approved I will my approach. These challenges have helped me discover that software engineering is beyond writing and debugging code. I will sometimes spend more time setting up development environments, talk to other engineers, and write up my engineering plan before I start working on a project.