In the winter semester of 2021, while I was registering for the course Software Development using Open Source offered by Professor Pankaj Jalote, I got a chance to work with Sheroes.
Sheroes is a Women-Only Social Network offering communities, a counseling chat helpline, and social commerce. Our initial project was to make a dedicated survey platform that would be used internally by the team members and community of Sheroes.
For the first four months, also part of the course project, we worked in a team of four. Additionally, we also had our mentors, Sunil and Simran from Sheroes. I worked as the platform's designer and frontend developer for 4 months. Initially, I was responsible for conducting competitive analysis and feature prioritization and contributed to constructing the Software Requirements Specification Document. Later in the project, I worked on the designs and the development of the platform's user interface. The designs were created in Figma, and the frontend was built in React and deployed on Cloudflare. This was my first experience working with React. I got a chance to work on technologies like Rest APIs and docker. The whole project was maintained on GitHub, and it earned me hands-on experience with using various git features.
Our team planned to deliver two releases by the end of the four months. During these times, we got to interact with the organization's product manager and Technical Lead. We used to have weekly meetings. This provided the team an experience of working in an agile development process. The team was able to deliver the 2 releases by the end of April 2021.
After 4 months, our team was offered to work as summer interns with the organization. I was chosen to work full-time during the summer. This marked the beginning of the 2nd phase of my journey with Sheroes. Last four months, our team interacted with only two people from the organization. Now, I was formally welcomed to the organization to work in total capacity with them. My responsibilities started with deploying the initial product we worked on and improving it for the first few weeks. This time, I worked on the front and backend part of the project, which was built on Django. I solely handled the deployment of this project, and I feel happy this product is being used in the organization.
My other experiences in working with Sheroes include working on Sheco. Sheco is India's first women-only social selling platform, and I got a chance to work on various segments of Sheco. During my internship, I made many updates to the Sheco platform.
In summarizing, I got to go on multiple products within the same organization. Working with Sheroes taught me to take ownership of my work and gave me more experience in the agile development process. We used to have a scrum meeting daily, and I got to interact with top officials of the company. I got an opportunity to interact with Sairee Chahal, the founder of the organization and a great inspiration.
Overall this internship didn't just improve my technical skills. It also landed me a lot of soft skills like communicating with team members, documenting every step of the product development process, presenting products to different teams, and onboarding the team members to new products. It taught me how at times, you have to single-handedly take charge of a situation and make decisions for your team, respecting and understanding the choices of your team members. Most importantly, how small efforts by every team member can help them and the whole society. I'm grateful to my peers at college and the organization's team, which makes selfless efforts to keep the feeling of HEROES ignited in SHEROES.
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