It has been an amazing experience interning at Playa this summer. I am a Computer Science major at UC Berkeley. Coming back to Hong Kong for the summer, I was lucky enough to find an internship at Playa. Playa is a start-up that specialises in website and mobile application development. I was given the opportunity to contribute to various of their projects despite the short period of time, both as a designer and a developer. The best thing about interning at a start-up company is that you get to learn almost all aspects of how the company works. I was able to participate in all sorts of tasks. Each and every tasks I encountered were both exhilarating and completely new to me.
I can roughly separate the tasks I was assigned into three groups: planning, design, and development. I had the opportunity to attend meetings with clients and involve in the planning process. Knowing nothing about how businesses work, I was humbled and thrilled to take part in the formations of ideas and business arrangements with Playa. After a plan is formed, we design. I learned to use the Sketch App to create mockups for mobile and web applications, from small components to the whole application itself. On the backend side of the projects, I was also assigned to design the database structure of Firebase apps, which is essential to the developing of the applications. I learned not only to create websites with website builder like Wordpress and Wix, but also to develop applications with Angular, Typescript, HTML, and CSS.
The project that I was most proud of participating in was a mobile app project. I have had no experience of creating anymobile applications before this internship. Playa taught me everything from scratch. Playa creates hybrid apps which are hosted inside native applications that utilizes a mobile platform’s webview. I designed the layouts and functions of the mobile app. Then I applied the design and developed a whole new app with my teammates using the ionic framework. It was an extremely fulfilling experience for me, watching a mobile application slowly came into formation based on my design and with my code. Although I couldn’t stay long enough to see the finishing of the product itself, I am grateful for all the things I got to learned through this project.
My teammates at Playa were a couple of the best teachers I have ever met. They never hesitated in giving me guidance and support throughout each project. The amount and range of skills I acquired through this internship were so much more than I had hoped for. Thank you for all, Playa!
Joni Leung (Summer Intern 2017)
