Our Interns Love Us Almost as Much as We Love Them

Metal Toad's Internship Program has grown leaps and bounds since I arrived last year. I could not be prouder of all of our interns, but our latest batch hold a special place in my heart.

Lori Zanotta and Monique Tucker have been great additions to our team. Their passion for learning our culture and our craft has been second to none and we wish them all the success in the world moving forward. They have become honorary Toads in such a short time! And they have left an indellible mark on our team and our workplace.

Lori shared her six-week internship experience with the Toads in her blog post below:

From the first day of my internship at Metal Toad, I was made to feel welcome and a part of the team. I was immersed into the day-to-day workflow. The internship was well structured and my weeks were organised into three parts:  two days for project, two days for QA, and one day for sprints.

My internal project involved the Toadboard. The Toadboard uses Angular.js and displays different data for people inside Metal Toad to view. It has different view panels that show vacation time, blogs, current kegerator info (learn more about the kegerator here! http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/kegerator), Slack messages, and Github commits.

My focus was on the Github commits. The current graph uses D3 to draw a bar graph that displays the top five commits for each day. Each commit is displayed next to each other for that day. My project was to get rid of D3 and only use Angular.js and SVG to draw a stacked bar graph.  Each commit for a given day would display on top of each other rather than next to each other. I had worked a little bit with Angular.js, but not at all with D3 or SVG. First, I Googled SVG to learn how to make a stacked graph. I then began using some sample data with the same structure I would get from Github. I took this knowledge to the Toadboard repo and put it all together. I spent some time cleaning up my code and making it more dynamic. I thought this was an excellent project to work on. I enjoyed adding to my Angular.js knowledge and learning about SVG. Whenever I was stuck, I was able to get some great help and feedback from fellow Toads.

My QA work involved manual testing on current projects using JIRA. Learning manual testing was useful and it was a great way to  contribute to a current project. Setting up the projects in my local environment helped me to become more familiar with mySQL and Apache. I was also able to learn about Behat and write sample tests.

Sprints were given to introduce different frameworks or technologies. They were a good way to get my feet wet on things I would not have otherwise tried.

Overall, the thing that impressed me the most about Metal Toad was the respectful and supportive culture. Everyone is willing to step up and lend a hand to whoever needs it.  They support learning and individual growth. Metal Toad’s Junior Developer Program is also well structured and the Juniors are set up for success with the support of the entire team. I believe this is a great model that could be used by other companies for their own onboarding process of juniors. Metal Toad has been able to attract an extremely talented group of people. Most importantly, they are a great group of people. I am proud to have been a Toad.

My advice to the next interns is: congratulations! You get to work with some amazing toads! And, don't be afraid to ask for help.

A big thanks to Lori for writing this and an even bigger thanks to Lori and Monique for being such amazing examples of how successful the Metal Toad Internship Program has become.

These ladies will be a great fit wherever they land!