In the summer of 2022, I did an internship at Panenco, a Leuven based product studio. Rather than working on a seperate project, we had the opportunity to work with the team on their portfolio of products. I mainly worked on Valcori, a tendering platform. In this internship, I refound my joy in programming and learned the ways of working in a software company.
In Panenco, the backend and frontend teams were seperate teams, both working with their own stack in Typescript. The frontend team worked with React and the backend team worked with their own Rest api framework called papi. Working with Typescript is one of the best programming experiences I have had so far. It has the simplicity of Javascript without all the associated little quirks and excellent autocomplete. In 2023, you should be using TS for at least one of your projects. In this internship, I also learned more about everything there is to know about REST and CRUD, two abbreviations that are familiar to every software engineer in the world. To this day, I still use my learnings in projects and my work, even if it is not as a developer.
As most software companies, at Panenco, they worked in an agile fashion, with a close collaboration between the different people of the team, i.e. designers, product managers, frontend and backend engineers. This lead to fast development cycles where the team developed, tested and deployed features on a highly consistent basis. The two other interns, Hasse and Tim, and myself developed our own feature in the backend, where clients could export some of the reports to Excel, the defacto standard in industry. This was a great experience to contribute to an actual product, used by customers every day.