Technologies I have had to learn in order to advance the internship project goals

 My internship project is adding one of Microsoft’s new products to Microsoft Teams Mobile client. My project is the first time this feature will be added to mobile clients and this has not only required understanding mobile application development but also understanding how to build user interfaces for the application.

I had never done any large-scale mobile application development before my internship. The only mobile application development skills I had were from a Code Path course that I took during my first semester at Berea College. Although the class focused on Android application development with Java, I did not fully understand Java programming. I spent the first three weeks of my internship learning Java and Kotlin programming that I am currently using in my project. Additionally, I took an online course in react-native to help me ramp-up on building cross-platform mobile applications. Learning react-native was easy because my first internship was in web development with React. I found the general concepts of React applicable in react-native, with a few changes to cater for mobile development. Gaining some experience with these technologies before starting my internship has helped me easily debug code and understand how different parts of the code connect.

Although some of the courses I took in Berea were not directly related to the technologies I am currently working with, I have particularly found my Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ course really helpful in evaluating the efficiency of my code implementations. I also found my previous experience with object-oriented programming very helpful with understanding Java programming which is mainly object-oriented.