Node JS 101

My Bachelor's degree from a polytechnic initially made me worry about competing against university graduates. I was concerned about how employers would perceive my credentials, especially since many of my peers struggled to land quality internships.

When a "real" software company (in the health and safety sector) expressed interest in interviewing me, I accepted immediately. Even though the internship was unpaid and the tech stack was entirely new to me (iOS and Android development with Swift and Java, PUG, Node, and AWS), I was eager to gain real-world experience.

The company followed a by the book Agile methodology. They also expected a high level of flexibility from the team, so I contributed across several areas. While I focused heavily on frontend development, I also did work on the backend and occasionally stepped in to handle UX design. I introduced React to the company, partly because I wanted to learn it and partly because I believed it would be a better fit for the frontend. Using microservices and React, I built a web application that displayed real-time activity logs for construction site administrators, tracking worker actions across job sites.

I only needed 400 hours of work experience for my degree. However, I ended up completing over 800 hours because I recognized the value of the opportunity. Forsite truly set me up for my next role at Vista.