Internship at Conferro Heritae – Coding Ninja broadening his horizons

About the Author: Ambar Gupta, a student of Galgotias College of Engineering and Technology, talks about his experience of learning new concepts of programming. 

An internship is a buzz among undergraduate students and it was no different for me. I started looking for an internship after my 3rd year to hone my existing skills and learn new ones. I googled and explored numerous opportunities in top tier corporates. After a week of applying, I started receiving emails from different companies. At Conferro Heritae, I was one of the fifteen shortlists from over 145 applicants. The organisation accepted interns after they cracked an interview preceded by an assignment given two to three hours prior to the interview. An applicant needed to complete the assignment before the interview or would be rejected. The tasks given in that assignment were –

1. To create a web page with a creative login page for the user using a database connectivity.
2. To store the data provided by the user during login and display it on the screen when the user gets successfully logged in.
3. To display data using a decent and responsive UI.

This was to test how I wrote the code and how creative I was in displaying it. I entered the HR office for my interview. After being interviewed for 15 minutes about the job responsibilities, I was given a minute to improve their website. I quickly opened my laptop, visited their website, and jotted down every possible error or bug I could find. I was regretting not going through their website beforehand. The HR, after reading my notes, was astounded to see the bug I had spotted and asked me if I could fix it. I replied in affirmative and was given another minute to write a solution. The website was built on Magento and the languages used for developing the website were HTML, CSS, and JAVASCRIPT. Some libraries used for better performance were incompatible with Magento which was causing a delay in loading. I changed the libraries and modified the code to maximize the output of the libraries so that the website could load quickly. She asked me how I came up with it in just a minute. I told her about my experience in web development and that I had faced such errors while building my own website. He then went through my portfolio and asked me which languages I had used for developing it. The only thing that bugged her was my inexperience in Magento which was the core of the internship. I assured her that I could handle websites built on Magento, and I was hired.

I was greeted warmly but everybody got busy with the work soon. I realised that the employees were very particular about their jobs. My job was to maintain and build some new pages and features for the company’s website which was an e-commerce website selling antique and vintage items ranging from 189o’s pocket watch to 1910’s old vintage cars. Being a full stack developer, I was handling both backend and frontend with the primary aim of making the website responsive. I worked on a lot of projects involving complex applications. I exploited my skills and soon enough the work started seeming easy due to the elevation of my knowledge. Later I was assigned a project to improve the SEO for the website. SEO is used to increase the visibility of your website on various browsers during the search. This was not my area of expertise, but I used my basic knowledge to manage it. The internship was enriching in all its aspects. I learnt not only about the culture of a highly established organisation but also newer concepts of programming languages. 

Are you also bitten by a programming bug? Check out these latest programming internships and kick-start your career. 

Editor’s note – If you also have an interesting story to share, you can now participate in Your Internship Story Contest 2017 and win cash prizes and goodies worth INR 1 Lac!