I am currently undertaking an internship at FX Digital in Shoreditch, London where I have taken the role of a front-end web developer. My role is essentially to transform the website plans from the designers into fully-functioning websites for our clients. After the placement, I will hopefully complete my degree at Southampton reading BSc Web Science.
So far I have been involved in a number of interesting projects ranging from small to large websites as well as email templates. We use a number of tools that I was previously familiar with but through the wide scope of project work, both my skills and confidence in web developing have seen a positive change. We use HTML, CSS, JS, PHP as the main languages and markup; WordPress to make all our sites easily manageable by the clients; Twitter’s Bootstrap and jQuery because they are just great, as well as many others.
My internship has not been all work though. A big part of my time here has strangely been food. Working in the Old Truman Brewery [http://www.trumanbrewery.com/] on Brick Lane in Shoreditch allows for a myriad of delectable lunches which I hope to think I have tried most of. Just a two-minute walk from the office is Ely’s Yard Street Food market that houses some of the best street-food vendors I have ever eaten from, with pulled pork burgers, delicious BBQ wings, made to order stone-cooked pizzas and other tantalising options. Two of the vendors were featured on a Buzzfeed list of ‘splendid’ food vendors to check out in London [http://www.buzzfeed.com/thetylerpeters/20-of-the-best-street-food-vendors-in-london-f5gh#.ycQ0Naewl #LondonStreetFood] so I think I am in the right place.
In addition to the developer experience and food I have been very lucky to work as part of a small yet powerful team. Any anxiety I had about entering my first professional workplace outside of the bubble that is university life disappeared in no time. I felt welcome and accepted, feeling that I was part of the team straight away.
As I think about everything I have achieved up to this half-way point (both in the office and at the food markets) I am glad I still have many weeks left. There is still lots of time to learn ever-more about the wonderful world of web design/ dev adding valuable experience to my personal portfolio, whilst at the same time hopefully making an invaluable contribution to the fantastic company hosting my internship.
By Clayton Jones
