My strongest attributes as an intern

 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 working on projects related to mine. These meetings were opportunities for me to learn about their projects, share about my project, and ask for pointers on where to start my debugging phase. Writing questions to ask during these meetings helped keep the meeting focused and eased my note-taking process. This step in my internship was critical because it helped me decide whether to build a purely native or react-native component for the feature I will be working on. I utilized these meetings to learn the different experiences the engineers had with purely native versus react-native components. All the information gathered from these meetings helped me prepare an engineering design document to explain my engineering approach to the project.