It’s with great pride that we can say that our summer internship has come to a close. Eight interns took part in the program, working in our Krakow, Katowice, and Warsaw offices. From the very first day they were able to make use of tools that enabled them to work in virtual teams, a fundamental characteristic for Polcode.

The entire two-month project required a lot of engagement from both sides – that is, the interns and the Senior Developers assigned to them. Thanks to the hard work of so many people, we were able to train up the interns into four professional-grade Junior RoR Developers and four Junior Magento Developers. They are able to independently configure the work environment and work in accordance with project workflow. They will create a project repository on GitHub, and be more than able to cope with Heroku.

Thanks to the Polcode internship, the new Junior Magento Developers learnt to:

• configure Magento in two different language versions;
• create shop, newsletter, footer, bestseller section, menu, and slider templates;
• create simple modules;
• edit the admin panel.

The new Junior RoR Developers, on the other hand, became acquainted with:

• unit and functiontional tests;
• integrating a predefined template;
• integration with Mandrill and Stripe;
• using Capistrano, Redis, Sidekiq;
• pair programming.

Want to know how we did it?

Recipe for a Junior Magento Developer

1/ Choose an adept individual who:

• is capable of object-orientated programming in PHP;
• has elementary knowledge of MySQL;
• has completed at least one project with the use of PHP5;
• speaks English with ease.

2/ Guarantee access to the latest tools.

3/ Allow them to take part in workshops from:

• Magento;
• Best Practices of Writing Code;
• Web Application Security;
• Responsive Web Design;
• MySQL.

4/ All of which are taught by experts in these fields.

5/ Allow the interns to use their gained knowledge in real-life projects

6/ Every day, check their newly created code and provide feedback.

7/ Watch as their code becomes better every day!

Recipe for a Junior RoR Developer

1/ Choose a passionate individual who:

• has basic know-how of RoR and HTML/CSS;
• took part in creating at least one web app;
• speaks English with ease.

2/ Get them to complete difficult workshop tasks independently, ones that not only test their technical abilities, but also self-discipline.

3/ Invite them to take part in workshops regarding Best Practices of Writing Code, Web Application Security, RWD and MySQL – all of which should be run at the highest skill level possible

4/ Allow them, together as a team, to create an application that has a real-world use. Naturally, supervised by a Team Leader.

5/ Be proud of your new Junior Developers.

6/ Use the tools written by them.

We would like to thank all of the Summer Internship participants for an amazing couple of weeks. Good luck in the coding world!