Berlin.
Street art, cultures from all over the world, street guitarists playing Jimi Hendrix covers, massive buildings, big parks, triple the amount of car lanes compared to Belgium, bad English of non-foreigners and the freedom for anyone to express himself. A unique and wonderful place for sure!
An impression of awesomeness was definitely the first one I had. From the small signs of artistic expression that are to be found on every other corner, to the wild variance in neighborhood culture and aesthetic, this one city feels like there’s half a country worth of content packed into the area.
On top of that, the city seems to pay high tribute to its history. Street names reference famous composers and philosophers, churches put candles to remember the war, and the whole Berlin wall is marked throughout the city. A piece of it is still standing, yet, it’s now just a wall with some graffiti on it. But hey, cool thought.
Anyway, let’s get to the point: The internship.
The first day at UIZ was… A little chaotic, to say the least.
It certainly set the mood and tone for the following days to come.
Mr. Thakur, the CEO of the company, is a man with great ambition. He’s taking the company as far as he can, and is doing as much as possible, mostly by himself.
This does result in occasional chaos, when he is at times permanently summoned by the sounds of phone calls, bleeps, and email alerts.
At first, my role, job and future projects were very unclear.
When discussing the actual activities of the company with my fellow intern colleagues, they mostly remained a mistery to all. Nobody appeared to really know what the company exactly was doing. And during the following weeks, I would understand the reasons why.
After some time of waiting around (between 1 and 2 hours) and talking to another intern who had worked here for the past three months, Mr. Thakur gave me and the other new intern a nice welcoming speech: How we’re responsible for our tasks, how we’re our own managers, etc. The speech definitely was… Interesting.
After this, I was assigned my first task: Fix this receipt printer over WiFi.
I’ve come to understand that this thing has received numerous fixing attempts over the past 2-3 weeks, to no avail. So they pushed to task to the new intern. Understandable. Maybe the Gods’ mercy is upon us and the dices would roll well. Maybe this time the damn machine would work!
I did the usual IT research and investigation, received the advice to install a virtual machine because the driver didn’t work on Windows 10, which I did, pulled out all the tricks I could to get the drivers compatible, until I discovered that the hardware itself just didn’t have a WiFi module. Getting the machine to work was technically impossible. Well, at least they could stop trying for now. And that was the end of that day.
Second day, second task: “Learn prestashop”. And then he left for a while.
There didn’t seem that much to learn. Especially because I had learned it all the day before, during waiting time. When the boss came back after a few hours, I had to transfer all products of an old site to the new one. Which actually meant, clicking “export” on the first site, and “import” on the latter. Yeah, it wasn’t too impressive. Furthermore, I had to do some edits here and there to WordPress websites.
Nothing too amazing so far…
As time passed, I got a little worried. The minimum amount of employees required for my school to qualify for the internship was met, however, those employees were in the office in Nepal. Here, we have the CEO, Mr. Thakur, and another employee, Pratik. Who, as I discovered last week, is also still an intern (though paid) for another month or two.
After stories of the other interns and a lack of tasks that I’ve been studying for for the last 2.5 years, my worries grew. I decided to inform my school and ask for their perspective on the situation.
Some Skyping back and forth between me, the school and UIZ did appear to bring some changes. Slowly, I was (however still in extremely chaotic fashion) given some more difficult tasks.
As it turns out, hosting a few hundred of small WordPress and PrestaShop websites on shared hosting, results in a few lots of them being hacked.
The Google Sheets file definitely contained all the necessary passwords to work on these sites. Somewhere…
This week was a quest of finding data in the 10+ sheets without any columns or structure (just data pasted everywhere), randomly logging in to hosting sites, to hopefully find the site I’m working on, figuring out which of the three to four times copied “backup” folders the actual site was reading files from, making more backups of the current files, and trial and error restoring older backups until one worked.
This was a little bit completely opposed to what I had been learning for the last few years, where the focus was on quality and understanding the actual problem in order to get a solid fix for it.
The few times where I was diving into the debug mode and database itself, to figure out the actual problems, I got corrected for not working the right way.
However, it’s slowly getting better.
Me and Pratik bundled our desire for structure and destruction of chaos, and we created a clean document. I’ve set it up so that it contains structured lists with the websites, where all the information that we need is found right next to it (instead of in random sheets + somewhere in the control panel of the hosting + log in to the FTP to find the rest of the data in the config file). It has colors and column headers. It’s amazing. It’s huge. It’s going to be great. (Sorry)
I’m proud to say that I’ve brought back 7 of the hacked websites in a week, aside to various other random tasks. I’m in contact with the people from Nepal, fixing websites, setting up administrator passwords, configuring webmail, editing databases to restore accounts, removing corrupt code out of files, going through all the advanced WordPress settings, and most importantly, bringing a bit of well needed structure in the company workflow. Regarding interns, I’m definitely the only one who has his day and the coming days completely filled.
Anyway, this has been a nice wall of text blog post already, more stuff is coming either way!
Thanks for reading and congratulations if you’ve made it this far!
Laurens out.