A few weeks ago I started my new role as the Lead Dev for my company's summer intern project. We have 10 weeks for a leader, myself, another full time developer, and four student interns to join as a team and create a working application from scratch. In the Lead Dev position I will be focusing most of my time teaching the interns and building them up rather than directly coding the application. I will find ways that I can stop hurdles and roadblocks from slowing progress, while helping the interns gain insight into what goes into building an application.
Our first couple of weeks together have not been focused on writing code and more on less technical things. We have done team building exercises and already feel like a solid team with everyone willing to share their own ideas. We have defined the requirements for our project and had sketching sessions to mock up what our application it's going to look like. We have taken those sketches through several rounds of feedback coming up with a better solution than any individual idea we had at the beginning.
Towards the end of this week we were able to start writing code for our actual application. As we have started teaching our technologies, we have taken the approach of all working together focused on the same task. This had worked really well as the interns are getting to see everything that is happening as well as helping each other out if someone gets stuck. We stop to ask questions and work through the thought process a developer would likely use to solve a problem. By the end of the week we had built out a navigation system and a placeholder for each page allowing us to prove out that the navigation worked. It has been super cool to see how much we have accomplished in such a short amount of time. I believe we accomplished so much because the team is lean, focused, and engaged.
It had been an incredible first couple of weeks. I have learned so much by leading and teaching and not just doing. It had been awesome to see the interns really jump right into their roles and to see how each one learns differently. I look forward to all the awesome things we will learn together this summer and plan to share more here as we do.
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