Our latest superstar intern, Max, has just left us to go back to his last year of university at Queen Mary University of London.

https://twitter.com/AnnaPawlicka/status/505408829627326464

He's been working with us on server automation and on separating out our code base into better modules - heavy work, and with a steep learning curve, but important work for the company. Happily, he's done a brilliant job. We asked him to write up some thoughts on how he found it, and what he did and didn't like - and we thought you'd like to read them too.

From the start, I felt very included. Even as an intern I was never left out of anything and that was my first big impression of the team at MastodonC. I remember in my first week when everyone was moving to the meeting room for democake, I was saying that I have nothing to show. But Anna explained that didn't matter, and I could just talk about what I had learned.

During my internship, I was given the opportunity to work on many different and interesting tasks. From initially learning the basics of Clojure and getting the chance to do some ClojureScript too, all the way to creating virtual machines to allow certain tasks to be run locally for testing. I learned a new way of thinking with Clojure which was different to all of my previous OO experience, and using virtual machines locally to run servers was completely new to me too. In the end I eventually managed to conquer setting up a virtual FTP server, which took me far too long!

A lot of my work over the summer involved writing tests for existing code. I had to check whether given inputs would match a schema. However, the team wanted to tests these in massive numbers, not just a couple of hard-coded tests. So I got to learn about generative testing using Clojure's test.check library. Through this I got the chance to write my own small Clojure library. The team wanted to generate test data from existing schemas built from the Prismatic Schema library. After a lot of researching I couldn't find anything that would do this well enough, so I had a go at creating my own. It is completely open source and can be found (and added to!) on GitHub. Doing this showed me how friendly and helpful the Clojure community is, when I had problems I could ask questions on specific Google Groups or the more general London Clojurians, as well as various IRC channels.

Now that it has finished, I definitely miss everyone at MastodonC and I would happily work there again if I get the chance to. Thank you so much for a fun, interesting and rewarding time!

Thank you Fran for being a great boss, who I could talk to about any questions I had. Thank you Bruce, for making me into a person who paredit is for. Thank you Neale for helping me with all of my Git mishaps and showing off ridiculous Emacs commands. Thank you Anna for coercing me into going to Clojure Dojos.

Thanks very much Max for spending time with us - it's been a great experience, and we hope to get you back someday.