My 3 Month Internship Journey

Hello everyone! I'm Mustafa, a 22 year old computer science student. I'm excited because this is my first blog post. Here, I’ll share my experience, what I’ve learned, and what I contributed to Bruin.

The Intern: An Unexpected Journey

In a hole in the ground, there lived an intern.

On my first day, I realized this wasn't a traditional company and that I wouldn't be wasting time. I would be working on real features from day one.

I was immediately asked to add new buttons to our VS Code extension repository. To quickly understand the codebase and implement the feature as fast as possible, I fired up Cursor an AI powered editor I was already familiar with and had been using. This helped me navigate the unfamiliar codebase efficiently.

As I explored the code, I gradually understood what the extension actually does: the Bruin VSCode extension provides a user friendly interface for managing data pipelines. Instead of typing terminal commands, users can create, manage, and run pipelines with just a few clicks all without leaving their editor.

When I was adding the buttons, I tried to run the Bruin command directly in the terminal. It worked on my computer, but I wasn't sure if it would work on others, like Windows or Mac. Luckily, the Bruin team had already created a function for that, and I just needed to use it. These buttons became my first meaningful, user facing contribution.

During my first month, I was hesitant to take responsibility and to communicate with the team, partly because my English wasn’t strong. Djamila (I pronounced “Cemile” in Turkish) helped me a lot; she spoke Turkish with me when needed, motivated me, and taught me patiently. She’s an excellent mentor.

Then I hit the hardest feature for me, column level lineage. It was genuinely challenging. I worked on it for about a week and a half and eventually finished it. The root cause was almost funny: I had forgotten to normalize identifiers to lowercase, so columns weren’t connecting to the correct upstream and downstream nodes.

The feature I enjoyed the most and the one that received my first customer feedback was the magic activity bar on the left side of the VS Code extension. This was the first time I was able to exercise my own creativity beyond the ticket requirements. You can see the faded environment labels in the favorites section, right? That was my addition.

The coolest thing I did was opening an issue on Microsoft about the TreeView component in VS Code. I wanted the context icon in each widget to be visible without needing to hover the mouse over it. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, can you please take it from the backlog and start working on it?

Beyond these, I fixed several bugs, added more buttons, and shipped many small improvements. That was my first month at Bruin.

Key Takeaways

Looking back at one month, here are the most important lessons I learned:

Not all features are created equal. Some features take a few hours to ship, while others can take weeks or even months. You can't simply farm dopamine by checking off quick wins real software development requires patience and persistence through the complex challenges.

Nothing is impossible in coding, only hard or easy. Every problem has a solution; it's just a matter of how much time and effort it takes to find it. The column level lineage feature taught me that what seems impossible on day one becomes achievable with determination and the right approach.

I genuinely loved working with this team. They were patient, supportive, and created an environment where I could learn and grow. Having mentors like Djamila who understood my challenges made the journey so much better. The right team doesn't just make work easier it makes you excited to show up every day.

TO BE CONTINUED...