Ask HN: What's the one thing that let you grow the most as a developer?
It was this one internship that I had where there was no formal process or program to guide me. At the time, it seemed like it was going to be a nightmare, I certainly imagined early on returning to my classmates with stories of disappointment, as there was almost no supervision, and everyone I worked with was way too busy to try to think of fun little toy projects for me to work on. I remember thinking it just didn&#x27;t really seem like the program was very much of a &quot;thing&quot;, however I ended up being very wrong and this one internship I&#x27;d consider to be the single most important experience for me as a developer.<p>In 2012 I got my first internship at Intel to work on post-Si validation for atom. I remember there being a huge amount of build up in my mind leading up to orientation, &quot;What should I wear? Should I look up how to act?&quot; etc... On orientation day, after all the usual cheerleading, all the other interns waited in a room for our managers to come pick us up and give us a tour. It felt like we were waiting to get new families. I saw each intern get picked up by smiling, charismatic managers, all happy to see them, one by one. My manager never came as he was too busy and I was told to just come back in the morning and I&#x27;d get a tour.<p>So the next day, I did, and our meeting seemed forced and hard for him, but he was really trying to make my internship seem like a &quot;thing&quot;. Then all the interns who were in my section were given a tour of the lab and shown basically what they were working on, the different projects going at at the time. I remember being very concerned about what I was going to work on, what I was going to &quot;be&quot; so to speak, eagerly listening to every word, hoping to catch anything that would impress my superiors. Then there was one thing that caught my eye, a robotic arm, barely draped in a cloth, that just looked neglected.<p>After the lab tour and lunch, I met my mentor, a lead on the team, and we (me and two other interns) were to be assigned our work for the summer. This, it felt, was the moment I had been stressing over. They were each given duties, but when it came to me it felt like my mentor didn&#x27;t really have anything in mind yet and so something inside of me just blurted out that I wanted to work on that robot that I saw in the lab. He told me a story about how it got to be that way and how no one was really in charge of it and that for now I could start just by figuring out how it worked and could take it from there.<p>I ended working there with almost complete ownership of my own project, just straight up coding non-stop, for what started out as the summer but then extended into a co-op that lasted until I graduated. Having something to work on, with very little structure, every day, was so much fun you wouldn&#x27;t believe, and it was there that I developed the foundation for all of my programming skills.<p>I took that project from one machine that turned on but didn&#x27;t do anything to two machines that could calibrate themselves, move through an arbitrary topology using pathfinding, pick up parts, take pictures of the different serial numbers and identify them in a database, and cycle through the remaining parts in the tray with very high accuracy. Each component in this ecosystem was networked so there had to be fail safes, like you don&#x27;t try to move to the motherboard socket, if the actuator is already down, etc... and there were a lot of components. The only thing missing from this that would have made it a complete continuous integration system for Silicon was a test runner, which I would have had no idea what to do for back then. Any way, although I was a software intern, I even got to build a safety cage with an interlock, complete with a hardware-based fail-safe switch, for the robots, out of extruded aluminum! To be honest I didn&#x27;t really know what I was doing the whole time, which is why it took me over a year to do this, but it was such an incredible learning experience that I will cherish it forever.<p>My manager, team, and everyone at Intel ended up being really awesome to work for and the internship was awesome, even if it wasn&#x27;t a &quot;thing&quot;, but hands down the best part of that experience was just figuring out what to do with myself and then becoming deeply and passionately absorbed by it and coding nonstop.