Well, the experience includes the excitement of seeing the internship opportunity, eagerly waiting for an online written examination, preparations for the examination, getting a call and email for a face-to-face interview meeting, and a call from a talent acquisition lead. So, to begin with, the internship opened for quality assurance. I had no idea what quality assurance was before the vacancy post. So, I read and researched about it. At first, I was confused to find the resources to read. But after a couple of days, I had read basic knowledge like “what quality assurance means?, roles of quality assurance, STLC (software testing life cycle) and SDLC (software development life cycle), and Bug life cycle.”

I thought for an internship the basic knowledge would be enough. But I kept on studying and acquiring knowledge a little more as it was getting interesting. Then, a day for online written examination came. I was ready, I had done my preparation. The link for the online meeting was provided. I joined the meeting and there were others too. I remember there were around 70 more participants for the exam, but I don’t know an exact number of a participant because it was a number when I joined the call and later I concentrated on the exam.

In my mind, there was thought that the online written exam might be on google forms as the questions included MCQ (multiple choice question), but the exam took place on google docs. It was all a written exam. Also, I was unaware of the question pattern. I thought, there will only be 2 or 3 questions like definitions and types, roles list. But the question also asked to describe those. I know I had prepared well. But all description writing and marks included at end of each question made me think like I was giving my college exam. Anyway, I wrote the answers to the questions and shared that link to the excel sheet that the meeting host had sent.

Around after 4 / 5 days, I got a call at night around 7:40 pm for the face-to-face interview day after. I got really happy. I was going to have an interview taken by the leapfrog technology’s senior QA engineer. I was excited, happy, scared ( as it was my first interview for the job). I knew the interview is going to be tough because the written exam was also somehow a little difficult. So after getting a phone call, I started revising what I had learned before and learned even more.

The next day, I was excited & scared. I had an interview from 2:40 pm to 3 pm time allocated. But I was so excited and scared, that I had to take shower before the interview to calm my mind. Then listened to Eminem songs to get motivation. And, the time for the interview just started. I joined the call. There were two interviewers. I talked like I was calm and easy, but I was not. And the interviewer started asking technical questions related to QA. And I started to give answers. The interview was going well. And at some point, I even forgot which question I was answering. But it went well. The allocated time was 20 mins but the interview happened for 30 mins. I was satisfied with my interview.

After few days, I got a call from talent acquisition, and he started asking about my college schedule, and whether that I would be able to commit full time for the internship and job (if selected through an internship). I was positive about it. I replied that I can commit to the job. But the problem here was my college online classes schedule and internship schedules overlapped.

Although, he said the time was flexible somehow, the 2 hours difference was not quite suitable. Then I asked him for the solution if he could provide it. Then he replied, that if I could manage the college classes then it would be not a problem to join the internship program. But I couldn’t also miss 2 subjects of college class for every day. So, I told him I won’t be able to manage the college classes as well. Then he said that I was already at the third stage of the selection process. so even if I didn’t take this time to join the internship program, I would have a privilege of direct selection for the next vacancy opening for the same position. And with that note, I didn’t join this year’s internship program. But certainly, I will join the internship next year.

To be Honest, I had saw the internship alert from YoungInnovations previous year as well. But in 2020, I didn’t take the internship challenge seriously. As far as I can remember, the internship challenge was also same for 2020 as well. I tried to get into the internship challenge ( as in assignments ) to be solved before application in 2020, but i couldn’t even complete the first problem. And I didn’t ask others for help. That’s why I didn’t apply in 2020 as I hadn’t solved the problems.

But, this year ( 2021 ), when I saw the post on their facebook page, I determined that this time I will for sure apply. So, while checking the details of the post, the process was same as previous time. There were internship openings for 4 positions.

Backend Programming

Mobile App Development

Front End Programming

UI / UX Design

I choose Backend Programming as I was already familiar with it, and had done some projects related to it.

Next day, as soon as I woke up, I turned on my PC. And started to follow the procedure stated in the github README.md file by YoungInnovations. It listed what to do. I read that file and begin to solve the problem. The problem was

fetch data from the provided api endpoint, store that data in a database and compute “ average sale, minimum sale year and average sale in interval of 2 years”.

At first, it seemed easy problem. But i underestimated it. As i started solving problem, I found out that at first day i was only able to solve the first problem; fetching data from the api endpoint and storing in database. Next day, again woke up and started to solve the remaining tasks. I managed to solve only one task that day, and solved the average sale related task. And at third day, I managed to solve the remaining two questions. I was really happy to solve that task. But I was also not happy for the output I got for the minimum sale by year. The output was quite not exact. And I was already burnout.

Even though, the output was not satisfactory for me, I thought to apply because I was happy to be able to solve the problem. But here’s where things got interesting. There was options to submit the solution either in file format or the web format i.e either the file has to be manually run in the computer. Or already host it to cloud and be able to see in web pages. As I was applying for backend programming which is related to web development server-side programming and I already had some experience in backend programming during Python & Django training course, and other hackathons projects. So I decided, to submit my solution hosting into the cloud and present in webpage. But, I have to mention previous work on the challenge was not a waste.

And yeah, I started a Django project, configured the some internal settings. And started to work on the project.

Making model for database,

registering model in admin,

making migrations and migrating were easy.

And as well as writing the views for the webpage was also not difficult.

As already i had working query in the previous file. Also I was able to make some improvements and learned some new stuffs like creating pipelines, working with .yml files, working with heroku.

I was working on the local development server at first to assure the web app was working correctly. And it was. I was making git commits to the bitbucket, as it was the one of the requirements for the solving challenge. Every thing was working fine. But I got into trouble when deploying to the heroku. I had already done before deploying Django project to the Heroku but this time I got into trouble. The main problem I faced while deploying was I could host the files in cloud but it could not show those files in web in general. The issue was the Heroku Procfile was not being recognized. But some how, after working on it and searching on google and using my common sense, I solved that problem. I managed to deploy the django project and the web app was working fine.

If you would like to get look on the project then click on this link. https://yipl.herokuapp.com/

After able being to deploy successfully, I made more improvisation on the website like UI / UX, file formatting, query counts, pipelines. Actually, my brother also gave some feedbacks to improve the UI / UX of the project. After making these improvements and being satisfied with the final product, I applied to the position using the google forms provided by YoungInnovations. Now I am waiting for their response. I believe the response will be positive.

While I am writing this, I think this experience of solving YoungInnovations challenge made me realized to Not Underestimate the problems and be patient enough to solve the problem. There is always a way. And I have certainly added one project to my portfolio.