What progress should I expect my Interns to make each week?
For many CodeDay Labs Interns, this program is full of many challenging “firsts”:
- Understanding code spread out in more than one file
- Reading code someone else wrote
- Talking to open source maintainers
- Working on code as a team
- Using industry standard tools like Docker and WSL
Getting experience with all these critical skills is what makes our program so valuable, but learning new things takes time.
The following timeline is for interns in a 1-month microinternship. For the Summer Open Source Experience, the scope of the Assigned Issue can vary, and it is harder to follow a specific schedule. If you are mentoring for the Summer Open Source Experience, this schedule can still be helpful but we encourage you to take the individual context of the assigned work into account.
Microinternship Expectations
In a microinternship, assigned issues are typically quite small. Something that would take an engineer familiar with the project no more than 1-2 hours. For CodeDay Labs Interns without such familiarity, we expect their contribution to take 40-60 hours of work.
Week 0 (Onboarding)
- Learn about the project
- Identify used languages/frameworks
- Research likely starting points
Week 1 (First Mentored Week)
- Set up development environment
- Reproduce issue
Week 2
- Identify fix for issue
- Make some progress on updating the code
Week 3 (Final week)
- Finish code updates
- Open PR, wait for maintainer review
If Interns are making little observable progress week-to-week, and aren’t talking about specific roadblocks, it can be cause for concern. Remember that interns have committed at least 10 hours per week to work on the program - If they have made little progress, and can’t tell you about 10 hours worth of “stuck,” it’s likely something is getting in the way of their commitment.
One of my interns is falling behind… What should I do?
We recommend talking directly with interns who aren’t meeting expectations to understand more about what might be going on. It’s important not to be accusatory or hostile, make it clear you want to work together on a solution so they can get the most out of the program.
Interns will likely follow the advice and suggestions of their mentor more closely than a faceless member of “CodeDay Staff” - which is why we suggest mentors speak directly. However, if you for whatever reason would like to involve CodeDay feel free to talk to your CodeDay staff contact about the situation.