I just started my internship at Buzzstarter ‘Buzzstarter is the world’s first scalable programmatic content marketing platform.’ As a trial, I am currently interning part-time and remotely, but if everything goes well, then it would become more around next month. This is my first day meeting the team via Google Hangout, and I participated in my first Scrum. I’m being on-boarded right now, but I’m learning about their development process and philosophies.

I’m currently going through the intro project they have for new devs, and I’m enjoying building this small project. Its basically a blog application using all the gems they actually use on the real Buzzstarter project. One gem I especially find enjoyable is ActiveAdmin. This is my first time using the ActiveAdmin gem, and I’m really liking it. The one thing that surprised me was not having to explicitly define the resource’s controller. ActiveAdmin handles all that for us. I’m currently only on the second part of the project, but the project’s tasks are well defined and easily researchable.

Buzzstarter intro project on GitHub

Buzzstarter uses Agile development to develop software. Although I have heard of Agile development before, I have never used the methodology directly. Despite not being familiar with Agile directly, the basic concepts I read about in the Buzzstarter wiki about Agile showed that Agile has similarities to the concepts I’ve read about in Lean Startup. Things like: Embrace Failure, Deliver Smallest Product you can, Iterate Constantly, and Collect feedback. They’re straightforward concepts after being exposed to them before.

As part of the development process, we are using various tools to help with development. We use well known tools like Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp, and GitHub. We also use tools I have never heard of up until this point. Tools like Segment.io, Flowdock, Errbit. This is one of benefits I see in working with a team. I am able to be exposed to gems and services that I would not normally be exposed to.

I’ve installed the app on my local machine successfully, and I’m looking forward for the rest of this internship.