Observations from the Beehive Mobile Intern Team
At the end of the summer, we asked each intern team write to about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Mobile Beehive team embedded with Beehive Industries. Mobile Beehive team members are Avery Quandt and Tim Hoffman.
The past three months at Don’t Panic Labs have been invaluable for us. This experience has provided us with many challenges but also a great opportunity to learn and expand our skill sets.
The most notable thing we accomplished was building a fully-functional mobile web application in just a few months using languages and technologies with which we were mostly unfamiliar. We were also able to integrate our mobile application with the existing Beehive HomeBase application.
Some other things we accomplished include integrating our mobile application with the existing HomeBase application and understanding how to use the map controls from the core software and geospatial queries.
The project went very smoothly, however, we faced several difficulties along the way. The biggest issue was accommodating for the plethora of mobile devices out there, each with their own quirks and differences in the way they render pages. Another major difficultly was working with the HTML5 map controls. There was very limited documentation so we often had to result to trial and error to learn how to use the controls.
We had many small epiphanies throughout these three months, most of which involved finding solutions to tricky bugs. For example, we discovered a bug when sliding out a tab from the side of the screen. If the user swiped too slowly, the window would open and then quickly close. It took many hours of debugging but we finally discovered that the slow swipe was triggering a click event at the end of the swipe in addition to the swipe itself and that secondary click was causing the window to close.
Our greatest asset along the way was assistance from the Beehive development team. They were always available to help when we had questions or problems. The overall intellectual environment at Don’t Panic Labs fosters team collaboration and learning which are both key to success. The biggest thing we will take away from this internship is valuable on-the-job experience.
Beyond preparing us for our careers, this internship has helped to prepare us for our continued education. Our experiences here have provided us with real-world examples that will be beneficial when learning more in areas such as web design, database management, and programming in general.
