!!! Here I will explain the journey of three months of my remote internship at Appsecco. How it began, how it went on and what all I accomplished…!!!
First Interaction with Appsecco team
Beginning from the day, I first time interacted with the Appsecco team at Nullcon international conference 2020. I met Akash Mahajan at the networking party of Nullcon in the late evening and asked that I am willing to do an internship at Appsecco. He asked me to drop a mail regarding the same then we will see to it. Then after I came back from Goa I had conversation with Akash Mahajan on LinkedIn. He said if you are willing to learn about DevSecOps drop mail to Sunesh Govindaraj the DevSecOps team lead and CC me.
So I mailed him about joining in the summer vacation but due to COVID19 everything was disturbed, my college got closed, everyday became a vacation, and online classes started. I received mail from Sunesh and I was asked to do an internship remotely to which I thought I would not be able to learn much on remote internship, you can say I lacked confidence in myself. I was firstly doubtful, would I even be able to do a remote internship and learn similar to on-sight internship. Days passed and nothing was getting normal due to COVID19. In August I decided to join internship remotely and face the challenges. It was a great decision I took and at the right time. The biggest challenge was my online university classes and exams which I had to manage alongside.
I asked Akash Mahajan as well as Sunesh Govindaraj what should I get prepared with before joining the internship. Akash asked me to just read the book named Phoenix Project nothing else and Sunesh said Okay.. we do not expect you to know things for the internship, the internship would itself be a learning experience . Their replies gave me more confidence and made things easy for me.
First day of Internship
The first day I was quite nervous and thinking that how are we going to start, how will it go, how will I perform, will I be able to follow, and as you all know the brain does not stop with these questions and it keeps going.
Then I had my first meeting the first day with the DevSecOps team and Akash Mahajan. I got introduced to everyone after that Akash said you don’t have any pressure. It depends on how you will perform, ask doubts if you have any and we will do everything hands-on, it will be a great learning experience for you. The meeting and the first interaction reduced nervousness I was dealing with.
Sunesh Govindaraj and Ayush Priya used to help me out with all my doubts as well as explained the basic concepts too whenever I was not able to relate something. I learned how to break my problems into small parts and then find out what all I have done, what else to do to get the solution. I also learned how to troubleshoot and find solutions on my own.
How we managed the Remote Internship
Sunesh and Ayush explained to me on Miro, the workflow with the help of flowchart what all things we are going to do one after the other. We also used ZOHO Projects for setting milestones and the tasks under it. I used to mark complete when a task or milestone got finished. It helped in keeping track of the internship progress.
On a daily basis we used to have a sync-up call in the morning to discuss what all I have done, what issues I am facing and what to do next. Sometimes if I was stuck then also we used to have a short call to explain how to proceed further.
For resolving my doubts we had a group in Microsoft teams with all of us including Akash Mahajan, Sunesh Govindaraj and Ayush Priya, where I used to post my queries along with screenshots or what all I tried and what I am not able to resolve, what errors I faced so that I can get a quick response from anyone who is available.
Like this I kept on working and kept learning a lot of things which I used to document regularly in my report explaining the steps to do, the issues I faced. I really liked the approach the team follows. Documenting our own mistakes after troubleshooting them teaches us more and even helps the other people who further read the documentation.
Here is my report which I worked on DevSecOps Pipeline.
In the starting I used to think I am working little slow and when I brought this with the team, then I was told that we at Appsecco follow this approach
Crawl, Walk, Run
They said, no need to worry as you are learning to crawl then walk and then run. Slowly you will start performing the tasks faster.
We also used to have mini reviews in between during the internship and a final review at the end of internship. My final review with Akash Mahajan went well and he praised that we three (Sunesh, Ayush and me) of us have done great work as a team.
Fun Days at Appsecco
A good chance to interact with the whole Appsecco team including Gwilym Lewis, Riyaz Walikar, Bharath, Pankaj Mouriya, Shruthi Kamath and Apoorva Lokhande during lunch meetings. I came to know about everyone and we used to have skribbl leagues and our game organiser Shruthi Kamath for Fridays fun games is just awesome and too fair at giving points. I also can’t forget the strong competition between the top three players of Skribbl league.
As a reward we also got certificates for the various games which are played during Fun Fridays . I also got one for guessing games.
Extension of Internship
After successfully completing two months of internship on DevSecOps pipeline, I extended my internship for 1 month more as I wanted to cover the DevSecOps Cloud Native part also.
Here is the report which I worked on of Cloud Native DevSecOps.
So we had a review on the last day, I got compliments from Akash that he is happy with the performance. I was also happy that I did well but somewhere sad also because it was the last day of my internship.
Thank you for reading and your feedback is most welcome about the blog as well as my reports.