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About the Blog

Earlier this year, it appeared to me that finding an actual internship wasn't in the cards for this summer--a combination of limited opportunities matching my experience and desires, many of those not being a fit, and finally getting down to the last opportunity seeming to evaporate left me thinking about how to productively spend my summer. That's when I came up with this idea to not just work on my own project, but to also document it via this blog.

THE ORIGINAL PLAN

I started to imagine the ideal backup plan for the summer. I knew I had some specific knowledge gaps I was hoping to fill out on the job--deploying a project, seeing big projects written by multiple people being pulled together, how exactly professionals go about coding day to day in an office setting, how test driven development works, planning things out from customer requirement to writing the methods.

Some of this, I could do myself. I'm a smart guy. I can force myself to adjust to "red-green-refactor" and write unit tests, though it would definitely be easier following someone's example. I can plan my own iterations based on use cases I've pondered at length. I can toy with my own best practices and develop a good rhythm for making commits and feature branches in my repo. It might not be as smooth as a structured, already-in-place environment but there's no reason I can't deploy my own project while practicing key skills.

However, all of this proved unnecessary as I was offered a chance to intern at OrangeBoy, Inc (side note: they have nothing to do with this blog and this blog has nothing to do with them--all content, opinions, etc are mine and my responsibility). That's not really a good enough reason to abandon all this prep work, so...

THE PLAN NOW

I'm continuing the project in my spare time, in addition to finishing my final semester at CSCC and continuing my internship through the fall semester. This blog will be the place I document my progress, with an eye towards laying out the exact steps taken and challenges met (and hopefully overcome). The overall goal of this blog is to provide a bridge from the knowledge provided at CSCC in basic concepts and syntax to the basic levels of app development, unit testing, and beyond--leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow into the wild jungle of .NET development.

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