Twelve Internship Lessons

There are a lot of things that I learned from my internship. So much in fact, to list them all would cause the list to degenerate into a long, boring set of paragraphs few would want to read. Therefore, I believe the best course of action is to put my newfound knowledge into song. Sung to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas, here’s what I learned during my internship.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Digett gave to me:

Twelve Tricky Tricks

...I stashed quite a few more tricks in my toolbox dedicated to common problems and neat eye-candy: using CSS, some PHP, and other assorted technologies, like CSS sprites and sticking sidebars.

Eleven Softwares ‘Plenty

...featuring Drupal, Jekyll, Weebly, phpMyAdmin, gitHub, Wordpress, Pantheon, Rackspace, LastPass, FileZilla, and Google (and more). Exposure to these platforms were eye-opening.

Ten Phones a Flying

...and now I am hopelessly focused on building mobile apps and websites following responsive design. Seriously, we need more mobile friendly sites out there!

Nine Business Insights

...just sitting in the office gave me a bit of insight into the professional world — it was my first “official” internship and entrance into a professional setting. Certainly a far cry from individual and school work.

Eight Passing Buses

...where going to the office forced me to explore San Antonio and learn the VIA bus system. It certainly helped me figure out how to more efficiently plan trips.

Seven Silky Practices

…in working with my projects and independent research, I learned what to do and what not to do, both in reading and in experience. (Oh god, the flash sites.)

Six Future Languages

...self research about HTML5 and WebGL as a potential replacement for Flash is intriguing, and I definitely plan to learn more next year.

Five-eee Awesome People

...Mark, JD, Valerie, Amy, Jonathan. You guys (and gals!) rock.

Four (Plus) Funky Projects

...and in no particular order, Padgett, ACH, Kendall County PTO, CSR, CiviCRM, and many more that may or may not have been left out in terms of useful and insightful projects.

Three Empowered Words

...reviewing my skills in CSS, Javascript, PHP, HTML, SQL, and general management really showed me where I still need to work on and what I can improve even more.

Two Moving Goals

...where I learned the valuable lesson that requirements, tools, and even the very foundation of a project are subject to change at any time.

And an Internship at the Digett Office

Thanks to everyone at Digett for having me, and thank you, the reader, for singing along.

From this sophomore to you, have a great year!