Conquering Daunting Tasks: My Growth as a Backend Developer Through the HNG Internship
Tags: beginners, introduction, php, laravel
Published: 2024-06-29 23:28:19

I am Abdulmujeeb Abdulrahman, a PHP/Laravel Backend developer, an avid problem solver, and a tech enthusiast. My natural inclination to fix things and solve problems led me to become a Backend Developer. I have this passion to make hard things easy by creating easy solutions for users and this as you may already know, may never be possible without first doing hard things. 

In my role as a backend developer, I was once required to build a smart suggestive feature for a movie streaming platform. This feature uses data collected from user interactions, such as movie votes and the viewing history of an authenticated user. To solve this, I broke it down and solved it in the following steps:

- Create an endpoint for the like button and store the genre of the content liked in relation with the user.

- Array of genres must be merged; here I made use of the PHP's array_merge(), and must be unique; I made use of the PHP's array_unique().

- Subsequent likes for a particular authenticated user will only update the previously existing ones.

- The column storing the uniquely gathered genres per like is of JSON data type.

- For suggesting contents, the array of genres stored in relation to the user is used to fetch out random contents with similar genres using the MySQL `WHERE IN` key.

- The response was paginated using the Laravel paginate() method for easy pagination implementation by the Frontend engineer.

Initially, the task felt challenging but I learned quite a lot while solving it. I then got to know that there are better and more efficient ways of achieving this only if I knew how to. This motivated me to seek out opportunities to improve my efficiency, and tasks I could take on to make me more conversant with these _better_ and _more efficient_ ways then I heard about the HNG [Internship](https://hng.tech/internship).
  

I joined the [Hng Internship](https://hng.tech/internship) for this reason - doing hard things. I learned about the internship from a WhatsApp forum for PHP/Laravel developers when a member was giving testimony of how he was drilled by the daunting tasks given to them during the internship and how it has helped hone his technical skills and shaped his professional life. I got so pumped by this testimony and I resolved to join the next cohort which was to start in August 2023  - HNGX.

The internship lived up to its reputation and it was more than I expected, for I was, for the first time able to perform tasks independently and remotely with a strong sense of responsibility to a team. I used some tools for the first time such as lucid for UML Diagram, dbdiagrab.io for ERD, RabbitMQ for queue management, and many more.

Interestingly, I became a finalist and for the first time, I learned about the [HNG Premium](https://hng.tech/premium). HNG Premium is an exclusive program for finalists. It is a platform where finalists converge with an entrance fee of just 5 USD (5,000 NGN). In this platform, members are privileged to have first-hand job opportunities, the privilege to interact with industry experts, access to valuable courses, and many more.

I look forward to doing more hard things this cohort, making more valuable connections, and most importantly, further developing my backend problem-solving skills.

Wish me luck!