OrdrUs, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Over the summer, I had the privilege of working as a software engineering intern for OrdrUs—a technology startup that provides online ordering for restaurants and customers.
I started out my remote internship with lots and lots of education. I began by learning more about tools like Vue.js which is a JavaScript framework for making UIs and one-page apps. This study of Vue would come to prove useful for the later projects I engaged in. For my first real project, I was tasked with creating my own single page app about anything I wanted, but in the style of what my final project would be. I had to use Vue, GraphQL, and an API of my choice to display some data and user queries. To start this project, I had to first learn more about GraphQL and APIs. Once I had a steady understanding of the technologies I had to use, I settled on an API—The Rick and Morty API. I built an interactive single page application that returns characters from the show Rick and Morty based on their name, species, type, location, and episode. This project, and the mistakes I made along the way, proved useful for my final project. At the end of the summer, I worked on my independent project that involved building another single page application and working with the Yelp API to display various information about restaurants commonly searched for by users. I really enjoyed taking what I learned from my first project and using similar strategies and technology for my Yelp app.
My time with OrdrUs was incredibly enriching and has made me want to continue taking computer science classes and potentially pursue a degree in the field. It has also made me want to seek out more software engineering internships for next summer. This summer was my first professional experience in the tech industry and it has left me wanting more. As a rising sophomore who has taken multiple computer science courses here at Williams, I was eager to expand on my classroom education by taking part in an internship that would let me use the technologies and languages I had learned in my first year at college. Getting to code in a professional environment, rather than just the classroom, was exciting and empowering. I was able to see how my skills translate outside of the classroom. Getting the real-world work experience that I have gotten at OrdrUs is invaluable, as I have built confidence in my coding skills as a software engineer. This confidence makes me more assured that I will be able to succeed in my future endeavors, whether it is more coding or something entirely different.
On a final note, I would like to enthusiastically thank the ’68 Center for Career Exploration and Mr. and Mrs. Case. This internship at OrdrUs has given me the opportunity to see that I too can have a future in software engineering.