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8 things I learned from my internship at Cetec-ERP

I learned to use SQL, how to use Vim, how to play banger office music, and 5 other things!

This summer, I interned at Cetec-ERP, a company that creates and maintains software for manufacturers / distributors. Here's their website. It was an incredible experience, and I learned tons about... well, a lot of stuff. Here's the list:

1. SQL basics

I had no knowledge of SQL prior to my internship. But my first task involved two SQL databases, so I had to learn SQL as fast as I could.[1] Now I'm at least competent with the basics. It's not a particularly hard language to learn, and I suspect I could get better pretty quickly if I spent more time on it.

2. How to work a real sparkling water machine

The office where I worked had a sparkling water machine! This wasn't one of those silly sparkling water machines you can buy on Amazon. Someone (probably my boss) got two water tanks, some valves, and a dispenser tube and slapped them into a cooler. As the intern, I often replaced the water tanks. It was a good time.

3. How to use pointers & error handling

I did not know much about this stuff before my internship.[2] But I no longer know how I would live without pointers and error handling. They're the best!

4. How to use Vim

To my inexperienced eyes, Vim seemed really silly. I would think to myself: "Why is this person forgoing the mouse and trackpad when they are so insanely useful? Why are they always spamming the escape key?"

Then I watched an employee edit code so fast my eyes could barely keep up with what they were doing. Now I'm a relatively avid Vim user. It has a very high learning curve, but it's so worth it.

5. Put a sunshade on your car

I live in Austin, and I would park my car at work for six hours in the July and August sun. After my first day at work, I could not drive home for a solid ten minutes (even with the AC on full blast) because my steering wheel was too hot.[3] I learned two lessons from that experience:

6. How to use Go unit tests

Unit tests are incredibly useful[4]! My tests highlighted a lot of problems with my code I wouldn't have caught otherwise. I also learned I should segment my functions so they each do one or two clear things. Shorter & segmented functions are easier to read and easier to test.

7. How to play good office music

Playing good office music is an art. After I got speaker access, I figured out pretty quickly that these songs were big hits at Cetec:

8. How to survive in the deep end

On my very first day in the office, I was thrown into the deep end.

I was struggling to stay afloat after just a massive amount of information was thrown at me. I felt like I barely knew anything. My coding experience peaked at solving mathematical problems on Project Euler—and they wanted me to learn so much stuff that I barely understood. It was all very overwhelming.

There was one main thing that kept me alive: asking questions.

Whenever I was unsure about something, I first asked the internet to see if it had an answer. Then I asked ChatGPT. If neither the internet nor ChatGPT could solve my problem, I asked my boss or Mike, and they were usually able to fix it for me in a couple of minutes. I think good questions are extremely underrated for the purposes of learning.

I learned a ton during my internship, and I wouldn't have learned nearly as much if my boss didn't throw me into the deep end from the very beginning.[5]

  1. SQLBolt was a really useful resource. ↩︎

  2. In retrospect, I should have done more preparation. ↩︎

  3. My car is also black, which definitely helps. ↩︎

  4. Thanks Mike for showing me them! ↩︎

  5. Thanks, Taylor. ↩︎