A little while ago, our intern Vladut was telling you in a blogpost about his first week at 4PSA. His article became so popular that we decided to share more of how our interns feel about working and learning at 4PSA. Today, we start a new series about their experiences where you’ll get to take a peek at what 4PSA Cool Summer Internship is all about.

David, one of our Apps Core interns, has a couple of things to say about his first task at 4PSA.

David, Core Apps Intern @4PSA

This summer, I am doing an internship at 4PSA for two reasons. At the Politehnica University of Bucharest, we have a subject called Practice. Basically, at the end of the third year all students must find a workplace to practice what they studied, otherwise they cannot graduate. The other reason is because I want to. I had many options, but I chose 4PSA because I liked their the Cool Summer Internship options, and also because I fancy the idea of working in a smaller team where what you do is relevant.

I have to admit that my expectations weren’t so big before I started. I thought that I’d probably have to work on some project. I didn’t expect my work to be significant for what the company does. Also, I assumed that I would be working with Linux, because this is the operating system we use in college, and I thought I’d be dealing with distributed and parallel algorithms.

I’ve been here for almost a month now and I can already say that what started as a mandatory condition I had to comply with soon became a gratifying challenge. From the very beginning, it was very clear to me what I was supposed to do. That was the moment I realized the huge gap between what I expected and what lied ahead for me.

I had to work with Windows and my first task was to use a library, cUrl, to upload a file to a server. That was a preliminary task, because now I must upload files directly on the Hubgets server. To my surprise, I had to code in Visual Studio and Windows API, however I didn’t linger on and started working on my task right away. At that time, I knew nothing about installing libraries and working with Visual Studio, but things got clearer with a bit of help from my mentor.

But let me tell you more about how I handled my first task. I had to install and make the setup for the library, which wasn’t easy at all because I had to include different files in my project and I didn’t know which ones. After that, I started to write the program. That wasn’t very hard, however I had to use some functions from the cUrl API, and googled a lot for instructions before finally uploading a file with the library. And that was not all. I’ve also learned how to upload files with HTTP Secure (HTTPS). I found this a bit more difficult because other functions and even some certificates were necessary. Finally, after two or three days, I managed to pull it through. The final product should be something close to Dropbox, a folder synchronized with a server, where you can save your files and access them from the browser.

I’m not there yet – it’s still work in progress, but I’m glad my contribution will be added to the product. The very thought of this makes me feel extremely proud. In fact, this is what I like most about working at 4PSA – whether you’re an intern or a Clouder, what you do is relevant for the company and for the team. I hope that my work will be of good use and at the end of my internship I can look back and feel that I made a significant contribution to both 4PSA and Hubgets 🙂

Stay tuned for more confessions, we have a lot to share!