As summer internships are a mandatory part of my 3-2 curriculum, me and my friends Alayna Shaheen, Sharmila, and Naga Kanaka Lakshmi started a search for internships. We have formed a list of software companies in Vizag and started contacting them via phone. We got some quick responses, but in vain. Some calls went unanswered, and we saw some green flags, among which we finally joined Harmony Infotech, which was reached out to by Shaheen.
We received our offer letters, got permissions from the college, and finally, the creation of a WhatsApp group named “Harmony Infotech Web Developer Interns” marked the start of the internship, where all four of us were present along with Alok Maheshwari sir, our guide and CEO @ Harmony Infotech, on April 28, 2024.
29th April 2024: First day of Internship
As it being a remote internship, I was at my own pace chilling out, and that is when there is a notification in the group by Alok sir asking whether we had any experience with Linux commands and usage of shell.
Despite my skill and availability, my curiosity level always touches 100, I quickly opened the chat and read the messages. Then you might guess what happened next? The situation arose where I needed to give a reply. My perception regarding the query is that I know the basics, usage and implementation of shell, as Linux and Shell programming are part of my curriculum, but I am not confident enough to say that “I know”. Finally, I collected the courage and said YES but the good thing is after that, sir didn’t ask me anything about that. This is how my first day of internship is done with casual discussions and fun.
30 April 2024:
Sir asked us to log on to terns.in, where we are supposed to blog all our internship experience and any type of work assigned as a part of it. On listening to it, me being in a hallucination that “I am a great content writer,” I felt really excited and created an account on it. Then Sir posted a message in the group that we needed to research and prepare a report on SEO auditing tools and asked someone to take up this task. Then my streaky smart brain found the information from my hippocampus that I know a little bit about search engine optimization and instructed me to take up that task, which I reluctantly followed. I have started researching the various SEO auditing tools available online, the need for SEO auditing, etc., and texted my findings to the group, after which sir said that we need a more exhaustive list!! Then I perked up and dove deeper into the tools. That’s the end of the second day of internship.
1st May, 2024:
Today we had a meeting scheduled for 12pm with Alok sir, in which we needed to introduce ourselves and share our interests and project ideas, if any. I got freshened up and joined the meeting by 11:59, and I was admitted to the meeting room at 12:01. Sir addressed all of us and asked us to go ahead with the introductions. I started to talk about myself and said that I was interested in learning API’s. Then all my friends also finished up their introductions, after which Sir briefed us about the company and his experiences with the previous interns and wrapped it up on the funny notion that he could get to see our faces in the next meet as all four of us didn’t enable our cameras. After the meeting, sir came to know that I am interested in learning API’s, and he assigned me the task of finding API’s that enable taking screenshots of websites. Then I started researching about those API’s which facilitate taking screenshots when I found that there are many such API’s like APIFlash, BrowShot, Selenium WebDriver, Puppeteer, etc out of which I tried to code in Puppeteer, which is node.js library that enables taking screenshots of different websites and storing them. This marked end of the third day of internship.
May 2, 2024:
In my internship journey so far, this has turned out to be the toughest, as today is my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary, so we planned to arrange a party. But unfortunately, today sir assigned a task, especially to me, instructing me to write a bash script to upload images from the current directory to the Im.ge server via their API request.
On reading the message, I started researching the im.ge server and went through its documents in order to finish up the task. Finally, I framed out a strategy for using the curl and jq command-line tools to accomplish the task. To use these, we either need to have a command-line package manager or access them using git bash. As I am not so confident with the git commands, I made the choice of using the command line. Then I installed Chocolatey, the latest command-line package manager, onto my system and used curl and jq tools to upload the images and parse the responses.
But here I encountered an issue with parsing the response using jq. I exactly don’t know why, but the JSON response from the im.ge is not properly parsed and resulted in an error. So I used grep and sed commands for pattern matching instead of jq, which worked well, and thus I felt that my job was done and enjoyed the party in the evening.
3rd May, 2024:
On the start of this day, I have just reviewed my yesterday’s work as a result of the group call with my friends regarding the work assigned to us, which says, “Given a list of websites in a file named domains.txt, we need to first take screenshots of all these websites. This screenshot needs to be uploaded to an image hosting site like Im.ge. Thereafter, this data (the website url and the screenshot url) needs to be stored somewhere (we can try using Google Sheets for that), and then this needs to be displayed on a website in gallery format”, in which I committed to fulfilling the work of uploading images to the Im.ge server and extracting urls from it.
Then I realized that my script isn’t working well as it is generating duplicate urls to the uploaded images. I tried looking at the script and figuring it out but failed to do so. Then I posted the issue to Alok Sir, to which he responded, saying not to use the upload method but to use the API request instead. That was the point when I realized that I hadn’t used the API of the im.ge server yet. Then I learned from many sources, such as YouTube and ChatGPT, how to use API’s.
May 4, 2024:
As I am left with the completion of the previous day’s task, I started my work early in the morning. I have completed framing my code by using the API request, but it didn’t work as expected, showing the output that it’s a “BadRequest.”. Then I was assisted by Alok Sir to check the example call before running the main request. Then, after doing that and hustling around the documentation of the website several times, I found that the header of the POST request is not customized according to server specifications. Then I made the required changes, after which my script finally worked as required for the project.
Then I submitted my work, after which Sir collected our LinkedIn and twitter accounts and inspired us to follow the indiehackers and gain meaningful insights and opportunities from them.
May 5, 2024: Sunday
As it is a FunDay, we too didn’t get any work assigned but just embarked on a blog on how to make our online presence. That’s it regarding the internship work today.
6th May, 2024:
It is a fresh Monday morning and I started the work of filling the lapses. As before, I kept the work of writing the blog on SEO auditing tools on hold After receive a response of collecting more exhaustive list of tools, I resumed my research on the SEO Auditing tools.
When I am done with collecting all the required information for the blog and am about to start drafting it, there is a message in the group by Alok Sir asking “Is anyone here aware of AI agents or has anyone seen any examples of that online?”. As I don’t have any knowledge regarding the AI agents, I replied with no to that message, after which sir has provided us some resources to learn about it. I have installed lmstudio.ai on my system to run an llm model locally and work with it.
7 May 2024:
Today I started the work of writing my first blog on terns.in about SEO auditing tools. After writing the blog, I have posted it on the group and sir suggested some changes regarding them.
8 May 2024:
I have made all the changes and my blog is finally ready and live at : http://terns.in/seo-auditing-diagnosis-that-helps-revitalize-your-websites-online-presence/.
And also, after completion of the blog, sir gave us a task to research a few frameworks which help in building browser extensions.
9th May, 2024:
Today, I picked up the task of browser extensions. I found various frameworks like Chrome Extension API, Webpack, Bootstrap, etc. I learned how to build a chrome extension from scratch.
10 May 2024:
Today I accomplished building a chrome extension using javascript and html by incorporating an API, which will generate a new joke every time the extension is clicked upon.
Then, I shared my outputs on the group, and sir assigned me another task: creating an extension to store user-selected data onto a Google Spreadsheet.
11 May 2024:
As I was assigned with a task yesterday, I started to search upon different sources and API’s to accomplish it. Meanwhile, sir shared some domain names and asked us to create logos and taglines for them.
I first decided upon using the Google Sheets API to accomplish the task. So I logged onto Google Search Console and started writing code to make an API request using the API key. But this referenced an uncaught error on the console.
After going through the documentation several times and taking the help of ChatGPT, I realised that the API key method doesn’t work fine to incorporate this functionality, and we need to use OAuth authentication to accomplish it.
12 May 2024:
Today, sir assigned us with the task of creating a tool like branalyzer.com which interprets and displays various aspects of the website. We need to focus on collecting only onsite data (logo, favicon, meta tags, open-graph image, social media urls, contact data (email, mobile, etc.). Offsite data like page/domain rank can also be added. For the onsite data, we need to scrape the website, but for other data, we may need to use other API’s.
After getting the details, our team started going through branalyzer.com and noting various aspects of the website.
13 May 2024 (Voting Day—Casted my first vote)