Feedback Loop Complete: Flatiron School to Front End Intern

Weekly user feedback was catnip to my curious soul

Illustration, Sara Harvey-Patrick

I finished the Flatiron School coding boot camp online so, apart from project reviews, I coded independently. I’d take the Q Train to Hacker Hours at a cafe in New York’s Union Square, but meeting up for me was more about seeing what everyone else was building, than building together. I wanted to know what was possible.

It was a paradigm shift to work this summer as a front end development intern with the educational start-up Mucktracker. CEO Kate Dalton led high school students through media literacy workshops remotely with the app, so I got weekly feedback on how to streamline the login process, or where to find a misaligned button.

It felt great to know that someone used the code I worked with, and that my front end fixes and features may have made a teen’s experience better.

Mucktracker lets students and other researchers pull article titles from an API, and organize the articles on a canvas for projects. The app promotes organized thinking, while reminding thinkers to document their sources when making assertions (in this day and age).

My larger contribution was to add a text field to the dashboard, to let users create new canvases for displaying articles. Then, I built a dropdown to list available canvases. I had used React, JavaScript and Rails as a Flatiron student, but got to add TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, and Python to my toolkit.

So, it was great to work remotely with, but with ready access to, Mucktracker’s technical consultant, Dan Singer. He conducted code reviews, and answered questions I didn’t even know how to ask. Attesting to his skill with both code and people, his main critique was that I didn’t ask enough questions.

I talked through my biggest technical challenge at Mucktracker with Dan—how to lift up state in “vanilla” React, apart from Redux and all the givens of Rails and object-oriented programming. For some reason, I saw the child component as a complete program simply plugged into the parent.

It took a while to comprehend, but I felt better when I read the comment of a seasoned developer on Stack Overflow, “I had no idea you could pass methods down as props.”

I depended mostly on Google in coding boot camp, so I also started to “talk through” my processes in my notes. A month later, I realized that full blog posts, where I explain the problem and solution simply for a stranger, was easier for me to understand, too. This was another takeaway from diving into an existing advanced codebase to unravel its mysteries.

I had actual conversations about features weekly with the Mucktracker team, which included activists and academics. I floated color combos to our advising artist, and got accessibility expertise on color contrast from another pro, a User Experience Design teacher at CUNY CityTech, Brooklyn. Our weekly Zoom is where I first heard of Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein.

It was an amazing first professional experience. The Mucktracker leadership and team were smart and caring, and genuinely interested in making a useful tool for students. It felt great to build with people, on behalf of people.

Read more about my technical takeaways from the internship on my blog, TidyElement.com.