Intern Chronicles: Jerad's Summer Internship Experience as a Developer
Alright, it has been a few weeks. So, what have I been up to? Well, the first couple weeks were all about Drupal basics and learning about all the different tools we would be using. It started off as an information avalanche.
Real WOrk
Once we started doing some hands-on work, it clicked a little better. The first task we had was updating websites on Pantheon that didn't have a profile associated with it. This situation gave us the opportunity to some practice in with the Pantheon dashboard and hosting sites locally with Vagrant. This seemed a lot easier in concept than in execution. On the bright side, I now feel pretty comfortable manipulating Vagrant.
Working with Pantheon and Multisites
My next task was updating sites in Pantheon that did have a profile. While updating the process of updating these sites was more complicated than the sites without a profile, I found that they were usually quicker. I discovered that most of the modules on a site were stored in the profile. This meant that once you updated the upstream once, it could be applied to all of the sites using it. Usually, after implementing the changes in the upstream, there was only a few if any, modules left to update. It makes a lot of sense to have an upstream for sites that are similar. Even with the added complexity, it makes the process a lot smoother and consistent.
Learning to Work with A Team
Learning how a small company operates is probably the single most valuable insight I got from this experience. The way the team communicates with each other, tackles problems, keeps track of time and divides the workload. In all my work experience up until this point, I have been given a project and seen it through from start to finish. Here there is a divide in work. I might be the one to update the modules on site, but someone else checks it and pushes it to live. Working with a large project like Open Enterprise, an in-house Drupal Distribution, really exemplifies this. I'm not sure any one person has total knowledge of the entire thing. I've definitely coming to see the necessity of Git in an environment like this.
Overall it has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I would recommend anyone wanting to get into this line of work to just dive head first. Especially if happen to have someone to guide you as Kyle has done for us. Even more so, if you can get them to pay you while doing so. Thank you LevelTen for showing me how you do what you do.
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