How I am solving technical challenges I face in my internship

 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 figured out answers to some of those questions and scheduled meetings with other engineers that have previous experience with that code.

This week, I found out a Git blame feature in Azure DevOps which is the version control website. Git blame helped me retrieve the version history, including the names of the contributors, to each file I debugged. Although I have not contacted any of the engineers I found through the Git Blame feature, I plan to use this feature to know who to ask different specific questions.

Knowing who to reach out when I have a question has greatly improved my productivity. I spend a maximum of twenty minutes trying to solve a challenge before I reach out to someone for help. This approach allows me attempt solving the problem without wasting time on a Microsoft-specific blocker that I can easily solve when I talk to a full-time engineer.