My First Steps in Professional Development

The Context

Back in February 2004, as a high-school student, I landed an internship at elephantseven in Gütersloh, a web agency. This was my first glimpse into professional web and software development.

Technical Challenges

I was lucky to have a supportive member of the team onboard me to their TYPO3 tech stack. I guess this was my first glimpse into what ‘meritocracy’ meant for tech folks without realizing. Thanks to my prior experience with web development (self-taught from books and online tutorials), I was actually allowed and able to:

• Help prepare the new CMS for client projects, and teach the team about what I found out
• Ship real features that went into production
• Participate in UI planning sessions (most folks didn’t enjoy CSS like I did – something that I still observe 20 years later)

Where school internships usually revolved around brewing coffee or shadowing people doing real work, I was just another junior dev on the team doing real work. The internship report I had to write was rather confusing for my teacher – she taught German at school, wasn’t a very technical person, and could neither believe what I was allowed to do nor understand what we did. She was happy with the report nevertheless because it was in part written like tutorials I put online back then, so she appreciated the effort to explain what was, inevitably, unexplainable to her.

Team Dynamics

I’m grateful for the opportunities to develop in cooperation with the others, since usually students don’t get to do a lot of “real” work in internships at all. The team treated me as a junior developer rather than just an intern, which was incredibly empowering for a teenager.

Also, I had to make exactly 0 coffees! 😄

Working with TYPO3 (a PHP-based CMS) taught me:

• How enterprise content management systems work
• The importance of clean, maintainable templates, working within the constraints of the system
• Some arcane SQL table joins

Personal Reflections

This internship confirmed my early passion for programming, and especially web tech, and showed me that:

• I could contribute meaningfully even as a beginner
• The tech community could be welcoming and supportive
• Learning by doing alongside experienced developers accelerates growth
• Professional development was the path I wanted to pursue

The confidence gained from working in such an environment as a high-school student set me more firmly on a path and belief that it’s absolutely possible to work in this space as a self-taught, passionate engineer.

Impact

This experience and the graphics work for Softgames reinforced my choice of doing freelancing, and eventually becoming an independent app developer. It showed me that professional development was accessible even to a self-taught teenager, setting the foundation for my entire career. And I believe that I genuinely helped the team with the then rather new TYPO3 system in some way. That felt great.