Journal Week 06 — A Short Week, Big Progress

Brief

Hi! This week, I had a day off for a holiday in my country, but I also made a lot of progress in several areas of this internship. How? Keep reading to find out :D

What’s new?

This week, I had a day off from the office, as well as a half day beforehand. Although I had already scheduled that day as remote work, it was interesting to be able to put my pending tasks on hold so suddenly. I think it is a completely different experience from the startup world, where deliverables and progress happen moment by moment and every minute is crucial.

How did this affect?

To begin with, I was able to pause some pending activities and shift into a kind of break—but only from those tasks. In general, I prefer to make progress in different areas during unexpected breaks, so what did I do this time?

As you may have noticed from this post’s cover image, I went to lucha libre. What mattered was not where I went, but who I went with: some of my coworkers. In my opinion, it was great networking and helped us get to know each other a little better outside of work. As expected, they were incredible company. I really enjoyed our conversations, which blended shared interests such as programming, cybersecurity, and AI with less common topics like future priorities and where we live.

In addition to this great outing, I took the opportunity to practice SQL again. It was a skill that was starting to get rusty, and one that I expect to use more in future work.

How are other things going?

I have improved my timing a little, and the thing I liked most this week was getting to work with documentation—specifically, the REST API server for the application I support. It gave me a better opportunity to explore several things, especially to pivot toward what I finally want to build as my internship project: automating a large part of the process I have practiced most within the team.

In broad terms, as part of support we need to verify that errors can be reproduced in baseline configurations. The setup varies with every issue or bug. What do I plan to do? Automate the issue setup by using the application’s API. But how?

I will design something in two parts. The first will be a simpler interface that lets us reuse application structures to generate more precise reproductions at scale. The second will give an AI skill the ability to use the application through the CLI. After reading an issue, it will generate a replica of the setup using our established conventions—the application will handle those conventions—so it can produce the correct setup.

Learning and progress

This week, I spent a lot of time doing research: reading the app’s documentation and API docs, practicing my SQL skills on my own, and probably getting back into coding in the future. I am pretty excited about that.

I think my biggest progress is that I have now decided which app I will build as my project.

Next steps

• Continue with my internship project and give my manager the final details about it.

• Keep practicing technical skills outside of work. I think it is a good strategy to avoid getting rusty in everything else.

Reflections

This week was incredible. The day off helped me improve both my soft and technical skills. The time I spend in this internship will pass no matter what, so I prefer not to waste it and to make the best use of it in every area. Please look forward to future entries about interesting things I learn. I hope these journal entries do not bore you, but I think they are a good way to practice my writing, stay consistent, and improve my communication for when I write about more interesting topics or ones that require stronger explanations.