It's week 6 at GRAYBOX for two development interns, Bryce and Anna-Marie. It's hard to believe so much time has passed, and there are only two weeks left in their internship. Both continue to learn a lot from the guidance of the many specialists at GRAYBOX.
Anna-Marie has spent the past two weeks continuing to focus on the project that was handed to us when we first started. She is definitely the happiest when she is able to work with code, and she is very close to moving the project into a testing phase. At Tom's suggestion, she picked up Twig for templating emails, and quickly learned that it was much more pleasant to work with that the PHP Mailer she had originally thought to use.
She spent a lot of her time finding bugs and issues with the project, and trying to squash as many as she could. She continues to learn the joys of moving data in and out of MYSQL, and all the multitude of issues that can arise when working with dates and integers in that environment. While the other developers have been very busy, they have been there when she hits a wall. Dan, Daniele, and Tom have stopped by with helpful information ranging from using var_dump or Xdebug for help with debugging to using the extract function which is especially useful when working with large arrays.
Meanwhile, Bryce has continued to work closely with Jacques, and has met with him on multiple occasions. One of the biggest takeaways for him is the behind the scenes work that QA plays in daily life at GRAYBOX, and the interpersonal skills that are necessary in building quality products and keeping all the parties involved content. As the QA presence at GRAYBOX, Jacques wears a lot of hats. At times, his role appears to be that of a project manager in the way he interacts with partners and developers. He emphasized to Bryce how important it is to build and maintain interpersonal relationships. Quality control isn't all technical!
Bryce also took some time to dive into accessibility testing. Learning about the importance of designing applications that adapt to the cognitive and physical diversity of users, i.e. color-blindness, deafness, etc. This took him down a rabbit hole of tools used to test accessibility. He also delved further into the various types of performance testing used at GRAYBOX, including speed and load testing. He experimented with tools like GTmetrix, and is now using Selenium for building test cases.
They are really close to the end of our internship, and find themselves wishing that they could extend their time here.
"I appreciate being given the opportunity to pave my own path and focus on the jobs that really drive and motivate me," Anna-Marie explains, "Working with GRAYBOX has taught me so much."