Below are a couple of tasks I assigned to my interns when they first started this summer.

[Optional] Read “The Checklist”

This is entirely optional but here is one of my favorite articles that I think also translates well to dev roles.

[Overarching Internship Project] Familiarize yourself with “transferrable tools”

No matter what dev team you join, there are going to be lots of opinionated languages, frameworks, and various tools they use. Part of having a career as a programmer is learning to adapt to that.

For example, React is a very popular frontend framework that’s in vogue now, but we prefer Knockout due to its simplicity. (If you are curious, they have some excellent tutorials but just know that if you were to go to another company, this knowledge won’t necessarily transfer. They might use Angular, Vue, React, or a host of other frameworks instead.)

But I think the knowledge and skills that are most transferrable across any company you join are the basic frontend components (HTML, JS, CSS). Even if you don’t do a lot of frontend work, you’re going to need to know the basics of each of these to do much of anything on the frontend. And in terms of languages, I always recommend people learn JavaScript because it can also be used on the backend with Node.js. This is great because with one language and a basic database, you can now build a whole system.

Now even within these basic frontend components, there are lots of frameworks, tools, etc. as I’ve mentioned. Luckily HTML5 is basically all you need to know for markup. But when it comes to CSS, you have Sass, Less, and several other similar “helpers” that may or may not be transferrable to another company. And JavaScript frameworks are a whole Pandora’s Box.

But if I were to name the two most helpful frameworks–and just like everyone, this is opinionated and there are alternatives to each–I would say jQuery and Bootstrap 4 are extremely helpful and suggest looking into them if you aren’t already familiar with them; many people consider jQuery to be basically a part of JS now and wouldn’t know how to code without it.

So if you are looking for things to do during your internship and for whatever reason are waiting on someone else or blocked on a particular task, I recommend going through tutorials. There are plenty out there; for example these look like good resources after just a basic search for Bootstrap tutorials:

Feel free to find your own tutorials and explore different frameworks. Every good programmer I know is curious and exploratory and I want you to always have a backup project. My goal is that you never get bored during your internship so please let me know if you’re ever approaching that!