Blossoming Butterfly: Career Birth 

After eons of job seeking, I was assigned the role of a software developer intern at Muhoko.Org. To begin, I had zero clue in terms of expectations for my first internship. A sentence to summarise the experience is: if you humble yourself, you will be exalted, since my role lasted longer than the six month period it was intended to. One benefit of my software developer role was, it was not a unicorn job which required tons of experience and an almost unreachable skill list. As a result of the Covid-19 virus, most of the work was accomplished online. The company carried on its daily tasks in spite of the virus.

For starters, the first few weeks were introductory: familiarising ourselves with the company, our roles and the tools the company utilised. Later, the heavy work flooded similar to a river and mastering it was not simple. In other words, they first provided us milk, then they provided us meat. The further time passed, the more cumbersome the work became. Sometimes, when I was certain a website was almost complete, new modifications would emerge. For this reason, to the readers who aspire to pursue software development, you will require an abundance of the first fruit Timothy mentions in 2 Timothy 1.7: patience. Patiently handle projects until they reach their ending point. A revelation from my role was I am a perfectionist. To illustrate, during website development, I would observe every detail several times: layout, content, responsiveness until I was content with the overall appearance.

What purpose does a software developer serve? To answer the question, from my experience, my main role was developing websites. It sounds simple, however there are plenty other tasks a software developer has to perform such as: studying customers' requirement documents, creating website timelines, drafting wireframes, communicating with the software development team, testing websites on various devices after development to ensure functionality and responsiveness, alternating between lead developer and secondary developer roles and monitoring website statistics using Google Analytics. Plus, I was involved in a grain of administrative work such as sending emails to customers, which was usually the role of the communication officer and business administrator.

One benefit of being a software developer was working with different industries, ranging from fashion (Windhoek Fashion Week) to tourism (Mufasa Safaris and Tours). Our first project was creating the company’s website. The flexible work hours were convenient. In addition, I worked with almost zero supervision, plus the team was easy to work with.

At first, I was not familiar with the WordPress tool, however by the end of my internship I was proficient. Moreover, I learned to interact with customers and co-workers. I was assigned a project leadership role for the following projects: Muhoko Studio, Mufasa Safaris and Tours, Social Engineering Awareness and another secret project which I never completed before exiting the company. On top of this internship, I was continuing my Computer Science Bachelor's degree through online school. For this reason, my attention was divided.

Overall, interning at Muhoko built my first workplace experience where I gained insight to the Information Technology industry.

by 🍓Princess Bubblegum