With my internship at Serverless Guru coming to an end, I write this to recall what the experience was like and to evaluate what I have learned over the course of the past month here.

My 100% Movie Accurate Experience

Since this was my first ever internship I had no idea what to expect, except I suppose from what I have seen from movies and shows, which we all know those forms of media are 100% accurate of any situations they depict. My idea of an internship was shadowing of a specific person; a type of apprenticeship I suppose. I thought I’d be more involved with the internal processes of the company, assisting with various minor bugs here and there or whatever. However, once we were given the general “schedule,” more on that later, we were told we would be studying serverless related technologies and such individually and then we would make a project using those technologies as a proof of concept. Learning a whole new paradigm for programming in two weeks is a... daunting task to say the least, using that knowledge to create a website the following week is yet another one.

Initial Struggles  

A major issue I ran into personally at the beginning was an overall lack of structure that the schedule didn’t provide. I was constantly struggling to stay focused on anything for any amount of time and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to learn anything. Thankfully, I spoke with some people about it and I realized that I tend to work better when I’m assigned specific tasks and that I could apply those tasks to myself, so I decided to come up with my own schedule to keep me on track and focused for a certain amount of time, usually an hour or so.

Then after two weeks of studying serverless computing and various AWS services, of which there are many, it was time to create a project. My fellow interns and I decided to work collaboratively and we planned out an MVP for a project we called Re:Source Hub. Our Idea for Re:Source Hub was to have a hub where people could share tech related resources with each other in order to help people find things that they want to learn about.

The whole point of serverless computing is essentially gathering together a bunch of microservices and putting them together to create something that scales well and that you don’t really have to manage yourself.

Re:Source Hub: The Plan of Attack

Our plan to create the website was to use AWS services to make a RESTful API with CRUD functionality and then use React to create the front-end and make it look nice. Essentially we got this idea from a guide on creating serverless applications we had all read and decided that following their example while adding our own flair would be the best course of action.

As I said before briefly, there are a lot of AWS services and we had to include quite a few of them in our project. The whole point of serverless computing is essentially gathering together a bunch of microservices and putting them together to create something that scales well and that you don’t really have to manage yourself. We spent a lot of time working on getting all of these different services to talk to each other correctly, it’s pretty similar to putting a puzzle together, but you can also create a few of the pieces yourself and that’s what distinguishes your puzzle from another.

Conclusion

In the end, we ended up with a really great project that demonstrates our new knowledge of serverless and AWS services. I also hope to be able to expand that knowledge in the future and create even more wonderful applications using the serverless framework.

This feels like more of a diary entry than a blog post, but I suppose the two aren’t completely different. The way I see it, part of the point of this is to be able to look back on it later and reflect on what the experience was like and remember what I did and to show others what I did.