How I Onboard

I was recently asked about succeeding in an internship, and I thought I'd share what's worked for me in the past. I'm writing this for two reasons:

To create an artifact in case I'm asked this question again
To reflect on what's worked well, in order to improve my process

If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them! You can reach me through email or LinkedIn.

Company-Specific Everything

Every company is different. Many of these thoughts are general, but some are mainly applicable to larger companies. The original question posed to me was about my experience interning at AWS and how I prepared for/succeeded in that role, so you might notice an Amazon flavored slant to some of these thoughts.

Skill Gaps to Avoid

The biggest skill gaps I've dealt with personally are:

CI/CD and all the related tooling
Code reviews
Testing and code coverage
Navigating and understanding large codebases, and particularly large/unorganized files

Maybe I'll write something for each of these in the future.

What Actually Helped Me

Asking to "shadow" someone who joined fairly recently. Watching them go through the motions of a simple contribution from end-to-end. Before doing this, install and build everything and get unit tests passing so you aren't totally lost in the sauce (build system/tooling). During this time, ask questions and take notes!

While I'm not sure if all engineering cultures necessarily lend well to this practice, the places I've worked have been more than willing to invest in new hires. Every internship I've done has had some form of "practice" contribution where you submit a PR to a dummy repo. This is a great first step, but don't be fooled - the real codebases you'll be working in are typically more complicated and less standardized. My point being, don't assume this practice PR will teach you the full development workflow for your team.

Being Proactive

The last thing that made a big difference was being proactive - scheduling meetings with people in ways that forced me to make progress every day. I tried to work with my mentor and onboarding buddy as much as was reasonable (while being mindful of their schedules).

Getting feedback early after my first PR helped me correct course before developing bad habits.

That's what worked for me, but everyone's journey is different - find what works for you!