Beginning the internship

When I began my internship, I got straight into understanding the codebase as I was eager to see and learn the technical side of Harker. Although there was a lot to learn and understand, I enjoyed the process of figuring out how everything worked and every day I felt like I got better and better as I got more used to working on the app.

The rest of the team were extremely helpful both at the start of my internship and the entire time throughout, as I was able to ask for any guidance or assistance whenever I needed. Even though I had a lot of responsibility for my own work and was given my own independent tasks, I am very thankful that the team were all happy to support and guide me through any elements that I got stuck on. I was also able to attend many team meetings throughout, which I found to be very insightful and gave me the opportunity to share what I had been working on with the rest of the team and get helpful feedback and input.

So what did I actually do?

My main task for the internship was to fix existing bugs in Harker, find new bugs, and make general quality of life updates. This provided me with the perfect chance to jump straight into programming for Harker, which definitely helped me get used to the job as this task involved me writing and understanding code in many different parts of the software. This was challenging at first as I didn’t fully understand the code yet, but I welcomed the opportunity to learn and improve. I was also tasked with finding new bugs to fix, which allowed me the chance to play around with the app itself which was also incredibly helpful to me as it gave me more context into how everything worked.

Once I started to understand how everything worked, I began solving my first bugs quite quickly. I was already experienced in Next.js and Typescript because of my previous internship at Jamescape (Harker's partner company), which helped massively as it reduced the learning curve that I needed to get started. At first I started with solving small issues like buttons on the app not responding properly. I then steadily worked my way up to larger issues such as the page not updating itself when you changed some data, which I had a lot of fun doing and it was very rewarding to see improvements in the software after fixing the bugs. The most challenging task I’ve had during the internship was adding Radio Buttons to the Form Builder. This was challenging because it was not a bug, but instead a new feature requested by a client, which I took on the responsibility of adding. The variation of tasks that I was given was definitely a highlight of my internship, as I had a lot of fun working on different features as every new task provided me with an opportunity to get better at programming.

Coming full circle

As I mentioned before, I have previously completed an internship at Jamescape last year, but before that I did a work experience placement at Jamescape back in 2023 when I was in Year 12. Coming back to Harker three years later as a paid intern feels like a major personal step for me, as when I began the work experience placement a few years ago Harker was just an idea and this industry was something I knew literally nothing about, so coming back to Jamescape in 2025, and now Harker in 2026 represents a huge growth in my skills, enthusiasm and capability each time over the last few years, which I am quite proud of. I have even helped supervise a new work experience student this time around which really makes it feel like it’s came full circle for me!

Coming to a close

The internship feels like it’s flown by so fast and I’ve genuinely enjoyed every hour of it, which is probably why! I have really enjoyed coming into the office almost every day to work alongside the team, and I feel like even though I have a laugh whilst I’m here I’ve been able to be very productive and I’m quite proud of what I have done in my 105 hours at Harker. It’s really reinforced for me why I wanted to pursue Computer Science and I’m already looking forward to my next opportunity!