Sanyam
Member • Jul 29, 2015
Internship Experience at Zopper
This post is about my internship experience at Zopper. Last year, I've already faced a tough situation when I started looking for internship in around period of May as most of the seats were already filled. So, this year I started my search early; in around January.
I'm a Python lover & wanted to do my internship in some company which works on it, so that I can get real world experience. I started the process of searching through various medium on internet not having the slightest clue about how to exactly approach companies. I tried out various sites for internships, but nothing seemed to work.
Then I came across some local start-ups group for Delhi, posted about me there, and voila, got a tons of messages. I started giving interviews (both telephonic and personal) but most people wanted to join me at that time only (around Feb), but I couldn't; since I had my vacations only in June-July.
I often attended various workshops and events, just to learn some practical skills; as I already knew, college was not feeding me with any knowledge. Due to this, I came in contact with few people. One of them helped me in landing internship at Zopper. [ProTip: Keep learning, join LUGs and other similar groups, go and meet people].
But still, I was giving interviews in other companies (mostly start-ups) because I wanted to have an experience of interviews, the kind of questions asked & this helped me pushed my boundaries; improving my skills by understanding what actually is desired from candidates.
After joining Zopper, I was excited to learn about new stuff. Till the time, there was no-one to mentor me, (yeah, first day, but I didn't want to waste a single moment) I started learning Django online. A few hours later, I got a mentor and a task to examine an Open Source Framework for integration in a Zopper App. After some research, implementation and testing for few days, that idea was dropped because of some issues discovered and instead now it was decided to have a REST API. I was excited and afraid at the same time, since at that time I had used APIs but never made one. I started to read about it, understanding various concepts and tools needed. Finally, I developed an API using Flask, MongoDB and an admin panel. Also learnt about Ngnix, configurations etc. and about security and authentication and it got live to production.
Next, I had yet another project landed up which was to be implemented in AngularJS. But I didn't know anything about AngularJS. I started learning it online through various tutorials and implementing it on the project. But I wasn't feeling comfortable with it, since I coded mostly in Python. Meanwhile, I had a plan to have a personal project on managing resources efficiently. So, I decided to put all the knowledge I've gained and implement it through the newly-learned technologies. I chose AngularJS, Flask and MongoDB and implemented that personal project so as to have a fair idea on the production level code I'll write for Zopper. After working on that project in parallel, I had pretty much idea about how things work, and started working on Zopper's project in full swing. I completed it and pushed almost more than 10-15 commits daily, but they're private commits and not visible on my github contribution graph to others.
Also, I've gained experience of the process carried out in a company by development team, QA team etc. In the process to implement that Angular Project I learned about some advance git and also about git flow. I'm completely fascinated about that. I faced so many merge conflicts, and then I learned about merge tool to resolve them efficiently.
From my point of view, if you're looking for a technical internship please have at least one of the three things:
Along with this, focus on developing your Github profile, after all that's the resume of Developers. If you're putting in efforts, sooner or later you'll get to see the results. Don't loose hope and never give up!
- By Sanyam Khurana
College: Northern India Engineering College
Internship @ Zopper
Duration: 2 Months
I'm a Python lover & wanted to do my internship in some company which works on it, so that I can get real world experience. I started the process of searching through various medium on internet not having the slightest clue about how to exactly approach companies. I tried out various sites for internships, but nothing seemed to work.
Then I came across some local start-ups group for Delhi, posted about me there, and voila, got a tons of messages. I started giving interviews (both telephonic and personal) but most people wanted to join me at that time only (around Feb), but I couldn't; since I had my vacations only in June-July.
I often attended various workshops and events, just to learn some practical skills; as I already knew, college was not feeding me with any knowledge. Due to this, I came in contact with few people. One of them helped me in landing internship at Zopper. [ProTip: Keep learning, join LUGs and other similar groups, go and meet people].
But still, I was giving interviews in other companies (mostly start-ups) because I wanted to have an experience of interviews, the kind of questions asked & this helped me pushed my boundaries; improving my skills by understanding what actually is desired from candidates.
After joining Zopper, I was excited to learn about new stuff. Till the time, there was no-one to mentor me, (yeah, first day, but I didn't want to waste a single moment) I started learning Django online. A few hours later, I got a mentor and a task to examine an Open Source Framework for integration in a Zopper App. After some research, implementation and testing for few days, that idea was dropped because of some issues discovered and instead now it was decided to have a REST API. I was excited and afraid at the same time, since at that time I had used APIs but never made one. I started to read about it, understanding various concepts and tools needed. Finally, I developed an API using Flask, MongoDB and an admin panel. Also learnt about Ngnix, configurations etc. and about security and authentication and it got live to production.
Next, I had yet another project landed up which was to be implemented in AngularJS. But I didn't know anything about AngularJS. I started learning it online through various tutorials and implementing it on the project. But I wasn't feeling comfortable with it, since I coded mostly in Python. Meanwhile, I had a plan to have a personal project on managing resources efficiently. So, I decided to put all the knowledge I've gained and implement it through the newly-learned technologies. I chose AngularJS, Flask and MongoDB and implemented that personal project so as to have a fair idea on the production level code I'll write for Zopper. After working on that project in parallel, I had pretty much idea about how things work, and started working on Zopper's project in full swing. I completed it and pushed almost more than 10-15 commits daily, but they're private commits and not visible on my github contribution graph to others.
Also, I've gained experience of the process carried out in a company by development team, QA team etc. In the process to implement that Angular Project I learned about some advance git and also about git flow. I'm completely fascinated about that. I faced so many merge conflicts, and then I learned about merge tool to resolve them efficiently.
From my point of view, if you're looking for a technical internship please have at least one of the three things:
- Personal Projects which solves a real-life problem.
- Contribution in some Open Source Projects.
- Experience in Competitive Programming.
Along with this, focus on developing your Github profile, after all that's the resume of Developers. If you're putting in efforts, sooner or later you'll get to see the results. Don't loose hope and never give up!
- By Sanyam Khurana
College: Northern India Engineering College
Internship @ Zopper
Duration: 2 Months
