Naked Internship Part 1: Introducing TodoWhat

Part 1 of a series exposing what it’s like to be an intern engineer at a tech consultancy. In this post I describe the project I was tasked with - all the assets and code are available as open source, and the end result is available as a Saas application.

TodoWhat is a task management tool built with backbone.js and Flask. It was built as part of my internship at Atchai Digital and we’ve decided to release all the assets that were generated during this project as open source. Please feel free to take the user stories as a starting point, refer to the code on Github, or use the hosted app to manage your tasks!

The project was designed to arm an intern developer with real-world experience in the following:

Writing python and javascript

Using Backbone.js, Bootstrap and Flask

Working as part of a team

Writing secure code

Writing tests

Continuous integration using Travis

Our code review process

Agile project management

User centred design

Hosting with Heroku / Github Pages

Using git

Responsive Design

The open-source ethos

It was interesting to be able to feel the flux of the development process, as well as observe those of the larger projects Atchai is working on. There is an ebb and flow in development; it is not a constant. It is impossible to know all the factors at the start of a project. I see now the benefits of an Agile methodology, allowing for flexibility as unforseen problems arise and requirements change.

I’ve written in more detail about how the project was developed, and the learning experience in the following posts: