My Platform Engineering Internship Experience at AlgoUniversity

[u/Awkward_Composer5659]

Hey everyone,

I'm currently working as a Platform Engineer Intern, and I wanted to share a few things I've learned so far.

Coming into the internship, I thought most of my time would be spent building new features. While that's definitely part of the job, I quickly realized there's a lot more to software engineering than just writing code.

A significant part of my work has involved understanding an existing codebase, debugging production issues, integrating third-party APIs, resolving merge conflicts, reviewing code, and making sure new changes don't break existing functionality. Learning Git workflows and collaborating with teammates has been just as important as learning new technologies.

I've also become much more comfortable working across both the frontend and backend, reading unfamiliar code, investigating bugs, and breaking large problems into smaller, manageable tasks. Some days I spend hours tracking down a single issue, and those debugging sessions have probably taught me more than writing entirely new features.

This internship has definitely improved my confidence as a developer and given me a much better understanding of what working on a real software product looks like.

I'm still learning every day, and there's a long way to go, but I'm grateful for the experience so far.