Overview

• What's HNG Internship?
• Stages within the Internship
• Communication within the Internship
• Assignment of Tasks
• Team Formation
• Communication among Team Members

What's HNG Internship ?

The HNG (hotels.ng) Internship is a 3-month remote internship designed to find and develop the most talented software developers. Everyone is welcome to participate (there is no entrance exam). Anyone can log into the internship using their laptop. Each week, we give tasks. Those who complete them advance forward. We pay the interns weekly. The intern coders are introduced to complex programming frameworks and get to work on real-world software. The finalists are connected to the best companies in the tech ecosystem and get full-time jobs and contracts immediately (hng.tech/about). It comprises of different tracks which interns can participate in. A few of them includes:

• UI/UX
• Digital Marketing
• Frontend Development
• Backend Development
• Developer Operations (DevOps)
• Project Management

Stages within the Internship

The Internship is made up of 10 stages in which promotion is solely based on a team or intern's ability to deliver tasks assigned to them. Failure to deliver task results in probation for a 24 hour period during which makeup tasks are given to interns to determine whether or not they get evicted. Whoever gets to stage 10 successfully becomes a finalist and receives other perks that come with being a finalist which interns get to enjoy.

Communication within the Internship

Communication is mainly through Slack in which different channels have been created for their specific purposes. A few popular channels you should know about is general and random. The general channel is where any information or announcement regarding the internship are passed and mostly mentors and officials are the only one allowed sending messages here. The random channel is open to everyone whether intern or mentor, anyone can send any kind of information here as long as it's not affecting someone in anyway. Each team within the internship also gets a personal channel for collaboration among team members, a mentor is usually assigned to each team to oversee how things are being done in there. Every channel within the internship has rules of engagement that are communicated among interns during the start of the internship.

Assignment of Tasks

Tasks are assigned weekly to teams of different tracks which enable interns to gain and experience the real-world scenario of solving a problem. Tasks can also span more than a week depending on the complexity of the problem being solved.

Team Formation

Team formation is one thing that's very important during the internship as it's the main determinant of how long one will stay during the program. That's why interns are always advised to network with each other in order to determine the skill level of each other so that it won't be a blocker for a team when tasks are assigned. An Ideal team is one that comprises of all the tracks mentioned at the beginning of this article in order not to experience much difficulty while trying to deliver a task. In situations where tasks are not completed within the stipulated time given by the mentors, interns are given a probation period during which the duration for completing the said task is extended or a makeup task is assigned to the team or intern. The probation period has a channel of its own called underworld and the rule here is, the maximum amount of time an intern could spend there is 24 hours, once the probation period has elapsed, the intern or team is struck for eviction.

Communication among Team Members

Communication among team members includes the use of team channels and other project management tools like Git and Github, Pivotal Tracker, Google Docs e.t.c. So any familiarity with any of these tools would go a long way in helping during the course of the internship.

Before I end this article, I would like to drop a little hint I personally use: always be ready to learn, you never when you will be in need of it. Like my friend once said:

If you've learnt it, you've known it for life.

That's only about a few things to watch out for during the course of the internship, there's so much more I didn't mention here because there's no possible way I can in this article, if anyone needs to ask any question regarding the internship, you can find me on twitter @zaydabdulrahman.