This past summer (2019) I interned at Enova International as a software engineer. Based in my hometown, Chicago, I was beyond excited at the opportunity to utilize the skills I learned in school as well as learn brand new things in a professional environment.

I started my internship in a two-week bootcamp for learning Go and Git. I already knew a little Git from my schoolwork, but Go was a brand new language for me. Luckily, my team captain and peers were amazing at helping me whenever I hit a road-block in my learning, and I was able to learn the basics of Go and start writing code for my project pretty quickly. (If you haven’t tried Go, I highly recommend it. It’s like a cross between Python and C.)

My project was titled “NOAA Maker” and involved sending out emails to users who were denied approval for my company’s services. Throughout this project, I gained experience in a handful of 3rd party services, most notably, AWS (SNS and SQS), Docker, Splunk, Grafana, and SendGrid.

However, my favorite 3rd party service that I implemented was a lesser-known service called “LocalStack” that allows you to create local mock-instances of AWS services through Docker. This vastly speeds up development time and saves money when your app relies on AWS services because you can test all your code on your local machine. I took care of LocalStack integration in my project, and even got to help integrate the service into other teams’ projects once I got the hang of it.

My internship at Enova was an amazing experience that taught me a lot about professional software development. I’ll always be grateful to the wonderful people that made this summer internship possible.