I had actually finished writing this on my second day, and only noticed today that it never got published. Since it's written, here it is.
June 8, 2026
Paperwork was wrapped up a little after 10 on Monday morning. I collected the laptop and went to find my desk.
One thing struck me as odd: nobody had me sign the internship agreement on the spot. HR said it would be done within a month. At both of my previous internships, that paperwork was finished on day one. After checking around a bit, it seems unlikely to cause problems, so I'll keep a record of everything and nudge HR in a couple of days.
There was a spare monitor on my desk, which was excellent news. The catch: as soon as I plugged it into the laptop, the computer froze and the screen went black while the monitor reported no signal. Updating the graphics driver and adjusting display settings made no difference. I suspect the HDMI cable, but I don't know the place well enough to go hunting for a replacement, so I made do with just the laptop.
June 9, 2026
I came in early on Tuesday and swapped the HDMI cable with the one attached to an unused monitor nearby. The display worked normally after that.
Work-wise, the first stretch is mostly about getting familiar with things. What I genuinely don't understand is that the company has essentially no documentation at all.
For a new hire, reading through docs is the fastest way to get oriented, and when I asked a colleague, he said there was almost nothing worth reading. Development requests mostly come down to the boss saying one sentence and the developer going off to build it 😅. Is this what agent development is like?
On my second day, a colleague sent over a Java-based MCP Server and asked me to look at it and convert it to Python. That was rough. I mostly work on the data warehouse writing SQL, rarely do development in Python, and know basically nothing about Java. There was no specific goal attached either, so my whole morning was a fog — I poked at it with AI and made some changes.
In the afternoon he asked how it was going and said it was about ready to commit to git, and I had no idea what to say. I set up the environment, ran the automated tests myself, then did some manual testing. When I finally asked about committing, he said there was no need to commit for now. 😕
On the following morning I timed the commute door to door: exactly 50 minutes from leaving my room to stepping into the office. With a 9 o'clock start, that means getting up around 7:40 and heading out at 8:00.
