Vivek Sah09/03/2015Prof. Stephanie Taylor

Internship Evaluation

This summer, I worked at Wellist, a startup based in Boston. Wellist is an online tool to help cancer patients in Boston to find affordable services such as childcare, transportation, financial assistance, housing and many others. I was working with the engineering team, which consisted of three other members. We were working on making the website more functional and more user friendly. It was a great learning experience for me as a software developer. I worked on the frontend as well as the backend of the website and learned many new skills along the way such as Git, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Test Driven Development and many organizational skills.

When I started, my first challenge was getting comfortable working with Git version control, which was new to me. With some practice, I started getting familiar with it and realized its importance. I understood how working with version control makes programming a lot easier especially when you are working in a team. I could then start working on my own projects.

My first few projects were mostly minor layout changes in the website requiring HTML and CSS skills. I added some buttons and linked them to specific actions in the backend using ruby APIs. In the frontend, I also made some changes to sign up process. I added email, password and zip code validations. Password and zip code validations were done in frontend whereas email validation was done in the backend. Moreover, I added reset-password feature where users could reset password if they forgot it.

One of the challenging projects I faced was changing the user object by removing unnecessary attributes. This required me to delete attributes in the User object in the Rails backend and edit frontend code to accommodate the change. I had to read a lot of existing code for this to find out how the user object was used in the code and what changes were required. It required a lot of changes and help from experienced team members to get it done.

In the last few weeks, I worked with Alex Rinker on a project in which we had to add free-subsidized flags to the vendors, which were free or subsidized. To identify such vendors, we checked the presence of certain keywords in the vendor object. After identifying them, we had to display the flags in the correct position, which took us some time as we tried various orientations and positions. We also somehow screwed up the Git branch we were working on which required some more time to resolve.

Apart from programming skills, I also learned how startups work. We had to make Sprints which contained our plan for two weeks and we had present at the end of every two weeks on how we performed. We also had frequent lunch talks from experienced people mostly about starting startups and raising fund. Overall, it was a great experience working at a startup and I look forward to applying the skills I have learnt in the future.