Dear Future Kinetech Intern

Dear Future Kinetech Intern,

As my time at Kinetech, as an intern starts to come to a close, I’ve started to reflect on the internship as a whole and how much experience I’ve been able to accumulate over just 10 short weeks. Besides the sheer amazement at how far we interns have come, I also began to think over what aspects of the internship I’ve done well and areas I’ve faltered or had a hard time figuring out at first. All of this deep, thoughtful introspection got me thinking that I should write out some of the major takeaways I’ve gotten from my time at Kinetech so far and some of the important lessons I’ve had to learn, in terms of learning Mendix, getting acclimated at Kinetech, and having a successful project. My hope in writing this all down is that future interns might be able to read this and have an even better and more successful time than I’ve already had here.

Come in Excited, Patient, and Open-Minded 

The first two weeks of training came to be remembered as some of the most pivotal, but also most fun, of the entire internship. During the onboarding process, you’ll most likely take your Mendix RAD certification training. If you’re like me, that means this will also be your first time having formal training in Mendix. While this may sound intimidating - and it certainly was for me - it’s important to walk in with the right kind of mindset for learning Mendix. This mindset can be summed up in 3 steps:

1. Be excited to learn something new. Mendix is probably nothing like anything you’ve seen before, and the process of restructuring your brain and putting the puzzle pieces together on how it all works can be massively rewarding if you let it be. If you come in with a sense of dread or skepticism that you need to learn a whole new process to be a good developer, you’re likely going to have a worse time and not pick up on things nearly as well as you would if you simply embraced the process.
   
   
2. Take a moment to humble yourself. Like I’ve said, Mendix is a brand new way of thinking, so bringing in your old outlooks on software development may hinder you a bit. Allow your brain to become a blank slate, and clear away enough room for all of the things you’re going to learn at Kinetech. Be open-minded about all of the new opportunities that Mendix can provide you. Even when you go back to school or have to do other projects using traditional high-code methods, the concepts and perspective that Mendix offers can still help with solving all types of problems.
   
   
3. Be patient with yourself and the process. I won’t deny that there are times when it feels like new lingo is being thrown at you and you’re expected to just pick it up instantly and understand how everything works. The key is to not get frustrated with yourself when it takes you longer than expected to put all of the pieces together. This is also why questions are crucial. Asking good questions not only lets you take a step back and give yourself more room to soak it all in, they can be the catalyst to make connections between what you know and what you’re learning. Ask as many questions as you can, even just to clarify and restate the information being presented to you. I promise it will pay dividends upon dividends later on. I think the single greatest thing I did for myself during this internship process was not being too embarrassed to ask a massive amount of questions early on in the process (even if some of them were dumber than others). If you take away nothing else from reading this blog than this point, I would be happy.

Sprint 4 Scrum Board

Early Planning and Process Diagrams are the Secret Ingredients to Project Success

One piece of my time here that I look back on as being probably the most underrated was the initial project set-up and planning. In general, I’ve always looked down upon planning, diagramming, and backlog building as necessary evils in the agile development process. Yes, they might be useful for getting a roadmap laid out and ensuring people are on the same page, but who cares? After all, I already know what the final product is supposed to look like after talking to the clients, so why not just start building? Well, I can’t even begin to explain how wrong I was. After our onboarding, we started our team project with a preliminary call with our clients to get an idea of the basic functionality they wanted and what their vision for the final product would look like. 

For context, our client was Alliance 4 Orphans. They are a non-profit organization that’s doing amazing work at combating the foster crisis in southern Texas by building a large network of churches and foster agencies to provide as much support as possible to foster families and children. Where we came in was to help them streamline the process of applying to babysit for these foster families. As it stands today, the process requires printing and filling out several lengthy forms, taking pictures of your home and identifying documents, and aggregating all this info together to apply to babysit at just one agency. Our task was to build a clean, simple, and non-intimidating web portal for applicants to come to and complete every step of the process in a single place, with access to org employees for assistance as needed.

After our first call, the other intern and I thought we had a good understanding of the current application process and were eager to get to work immediately on the app. However, we were told we’d have to go through the steps of diagramming our understanding and thinking through every last step of the process before we could actually start on the work. Somewhat begrudgingly, we followed these steps and filled everything out, and I’m so glad we did. Once we presented these diagrams to the clients, we quickly discovered that we had the current system almost entirely wrong, and our proposed solution wasn’t even addressing the scope of their problem. We quickly rewrote everything and got it approved, but there’s no doubt we dodged a bullet. It’s only now in hindsight that I can appreciate those diagrams and using the SMEs (subject matter experts) early on to get a comprehensive plan laid out. Of course, there are still unknown pieces that come up as you’re building an app, and that’s why we use Agile to navigate those new challenges during development. But with the solid foundation that good planning delivers, and consistent demos and feedback from clients, development just flows easily.

Current Business Process Diagram

Your Team is Your Most Valuable Resource

It’s true for any team, but especially for a project team at Kinetech, that you are only as strong as the team around you. More importantly, you are only as effective as your ability to rely on your team as resources. I was fortunate to be on a relatively small but close-knit project team, consisting of myself, my fellow intern Anthony, and our project lead Kyle. Especially while still getting used to Mendix, I don’t think there are enough fingers or hands to count how many times I asked Kyle for advice on the right way to approach a problem I was dealing with. His years of Mendix experience were valuable beyond measure. Any problem I was facing, I knew that he’d probably already dealt with it dozens of times, and any time of day I reached out he was available and eager to walk me through the right approach. Now it’s important to preface that I didn’t rely on his and Anthony’s help as a crutch and a replacement for working it out on my own. I instead tried my best to go to them as a last resort if I had put a lot of effort in and still couldn’t reach the result I wanted, or if I had two viable solutions and wanted to know which was a better practice. Beyond dealing with specific problems, I would spend most of my days in intern calls with Anthony where we would just work together and talk through our ideas and problems as a unit.

My advice also doesn’t restrict itself to whoever might be on your intern project team. Everyone at Kinetech is gifted in their own domain, so you should try your best to reach out to as many people as possible for advice and personal growth. We talked to Kyle Kunzer for technical help in Mendix, Jeff Watts for project management and planning, and Luke Bashford for consulting knowledge and professionalism tips, to name just a few. All of them were more than willing to take out the time and sit down with us interns, and all of them were not only helpful but clearly invested in our growth and success. Use your team and your company, because they will be the ones that elevate you to places you’ve not yet reached.

Administration Dashboard for Alliance 4 Orphans

Don’t Just Work For Your Client, Work With Them

As a final but crucial piece of advice, respect your clients as collaborators. Both of you are invested in the success of your project, and you both have plenty to offer. As the development team, we offer the technical skills to execute plans and the background knowledge to know what is and isn’t feasible on the given timetable. As the clients, they are the subject matter experts who know more about their problems and the current process than we could ever dream of knowing. Treating clients as simply another boss is a disservice to everyone, because you remove power from yourself to say “no” to their requests, and they get a product that might not live up to the grand vision they were originally promised. Saying “no” sometimes is an important tool, because it lets you focus on making the current product as good as it can be. The alternative is wasting time trying to rush and add on extra features that won’t have enough time to be tested rigorously and will likely disappoint their expectations. Being open about when you don’t think something is feasible, or questioning if it would even address the problem, and offering a valid alternative is a consulting skill I’d never understood the importance of until working on a project team. Luckily, we didn’t have to say no often, but the few times we did, it resulted in what I believe is an even stronger finished product.

I know I’ve probably said a lot of things were my favorite part of the internship process, but I really do think our luck in getting to work with Alliance4Orphans was the best piece of it all. We could not have asked for better clients to work with. They were kind, always willing to meet and answer questions, clear with what they wanted from the app, and so appreciative of our work. Having a client that supports you in the way that they did not only makes the development process smooth but makes you excited to reach an MVP that they can use to help real people in the state of Texas.

I hope some of these tips and anecdotes might help you, future Kinetech intern, to have as great of an internship as I’ve had. I truly feel like this summer has been one of the single greatest periods of personal growth and self-fulfillment I’ve ever had, and I’m grateful to the team at Kinetech for this amazing experience.

Best of luck!
Ryan O’Meara