This summer, I was the Application Developer Intern at Viget. This being my first internship, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned. Rather than being tasked with fetching coffee or doing busy work, the internship focused primarily on our growth and development as interns. As my time at Viget comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on ten key things I learned during my experience here.

Following the real-world development cycle

Going into this internship, my development process involved me sitting down and coding until the feature was completed, and that's it. During this internship, I learned and practiced the development cycle used at Viget. For each feature, I created a Branch. Then, I submitted a Pull Request once it was completed. After that, my advisor reviewed my code and gave feedback. Once I had completed the requested changes (if any), I would rebase and merge into the main branch. This cycle made the code cleaner, and the feedback on my code always ensured I was going in the right direction.

Maintaining a clean git history

During my development process at Viget, my advisor ensured I took the necessary steps to maintain a clean git history in my projects. I put the corresponding issue number next to each git commit and pull request. This made it much easier to see which commits belonged to which feature when reviewing git history. I also learned to always use “rebase and merge” rather than “create a merge commit” when merging a pull request. This helped when reviewing git history as merge commits make it much more difficult to understand what’s going on, and rebase and merge provided a clean git history.

Getting introduced to DevOps

Nevin Morgan hosted a MicroClass where he went over the basics of DevOps. Going in, I didn’t know much about DevOps, but the class gave me a solid understanding of the basics. DevOps is a combination of philosophies, practices, and tools designed to improve the speed of development. Their responsibilities include:

• Keeping Communication clear for development teams
• Making sure teams continue collaborating
• Ensuring deployments are quick and reliable

I also got the chance to pair with Nevin when he set up AWS deployment for one of my projects, and when he was setting up Grafana for Viget. Getting to see DevOps in action gave me a good idea of what goes into being part of the DevOps team.

Learning to work with clients

At the start of our intern group project, Nathan Long gave us a presentation on what it's like to work with clients. He covered the typical client project cycle, client presentations, and how to handle client feedback. For our project, we simulated a client relationship with Viget as our client. They provided us with their requirements, and me and the other interns planned out the details of what we would deliver. Throughout the process, we gave several client presentations, received valuable feedback, and iterated on our product. Two weeks later, we had a finished product, which we presented to the client in a live demo. This whole process was designed to mimic what Viget goes through with real clients, and seeing the different perspective required when working with clients was really eye-opening for me.

Exploring digital accessibility

Nathan Schmidt hosted a MicroClass for the interns on Accessibility. He gave us an overview of what digital accessibility is and who it impacts. I learned that digital accessibility is the lens through which we ensure that people of all abilities, and particularly those with disabilities, are able to engage with the digital world. Every website is graded to a level set from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines include video captions, text size, color contrast, and many more requirements. It is the industry standard to follow these WCAG guidelines so that your website can be accessible to a broad range of consumers.

Building confidence in public speaking

When the summer began and I learned that I would need to present to the entire company, I felt intimidated. Public speaking has always been a source of anxiety for me, but I had numerous opportunities to work on this skill. Throughout the summer, I became increasingly confident. First, my fellow interns and I presented our group project to everyone at Viget at the company-wide all hands meeting known as TTT. I presented my personal project to the Dev team, discussing the libraries I used and walking through my code. The most significant presentation I delivered was my final one, where I spoke to everyone at Viget about my Gap Year through a Viget Tradition known as LabShares. Public speaking is a skill that improves with practice, and the various opportunities I had greatly boosted my confidence in this area.

Diving into Vanilla JavaScript

Going into this summer, I had never written a line of JavaScript in my life. I quickly learned that JavaScript is essential if you’re going to work in web development. On my personal project, which was an audio sharing social media app, I had a for you page, and I wanted to make the page update as soon as the user went to the next sound. This would require me to write JavaScript. I went through and wrote Vanilla JavaScript to update all the necessary information from the server's response. Although it was a challenging and tedious process, it significantly enhanced my understanding of how websites work and the role of JavaScript in web development.

Getting my feet wet with Rails

For the first half of the internship, I got my foothold in Ruby on Rails. This was my first time writing in Ruby, so there was a bit of a learning curve. I started with the Rails tutorial and then made a Hacker News clone. This exposed me to a broad range of the application stack and got me prepared for the Intern project, where I also used Rails. I found Rails’ Model, View, Controller setup to be very intuitive, so the learning process was relatively painless.

Discovering the benefits of Tailwind

Being the only Application Developer Intern, my focus throughout the internship was primarily on the back-end. However, I did have the chance to use Tailwind for the first time during my personal project. The biggest thing that stuck out to me was how it was convenient to not have to go through and change the stylesheets myself. With Tailwind's utility-first approach, you can quickly apply predefined classes for spacing, colors, typography, and more, without having to write custom CSS. This makes it much faster to prototype and iterate on designs, as you can see changes immediately by simply adjusting the class names in your HTML.

Exploring the Basics of React

Chris Manning hosted a MicroClass on React. I had never actually used React, but he made the class very beginner friendly. React is a JavaScript library, whose main strength is how dynamically it responds to user input and cascades UI changes. Chris went over JSX and React components, props, children, and state memory. I didn’t have time to actually write any React this summer, but I appreciate that Chris hosted this class after I said React was something I was interested in!

Reflecting on what I’ve learned here at Viget, I realize how invaluable this experience has been for both my personal and professional growth. From learning Rails and JavaScript, to understanding the intricacies of client relationships, I've gained a wealth of knowledge that extends far beyond technical skills. The opportunity to work alongside experienced professionals and receive constructive feedback has been a huge source of development for me. As I move forward, I am excited to apply these lessons and continue exploring the world of Software Development, confident in the foundation this internship has provided.

This week we will bid farewell to our fifteenth cohort of summer interns. Ciel Park (UI Developer Intern), Faye Stover (Product Designer Intern), and Paul McKissock (Application Developer Intern) joined our team ten weeks ago and have been hard at work learning and growing, teaching and sharing, and iterating ever since – and so have we. 

At Viget we are committed to fostering curiosity and drive both for budding engineers and designers but also for our team of full-timers who are eager to learn themselves and flex their mentorship muscles. As we’ve shared over the years, the internship is one of our favorite traditions and while a lot has changed in fifteen years, that commitment remains the same. 

Here’s a quick look at three core aspects of the Viget internship that remain flexible. 

Cohort size and available roles.

We are not married to a specific number of interns. We recruit for and match interns with available mentors who serve as our interns’ dedicated advisors.

Working location. 

This summer our interns primarily worked from our Falls Church, Virginia headquarters. We required interns to work in the office for the first three weeks of the program and the last. During weeks four through nine they were able to work remotely two to three days a week. In the past the internship has been fully in-person and fully remote. 

Cross-discipline internship project. 

Interns can expect cross-discipline collaboration during their time at Viget but how exactly that takes shape remains flexible. In years past interns spent 8 weeks coming up with, designing and building a working product. This year, with our smaller cohort of interns, we opted for a smaller approach to the group project. The project was pre-defined, scoped by our advisors, and happened over just two short weeks.   

Earlier this summer we hosted an internship alumni panel and invited Hayley McMillon (2022 Summer Cohort), Andrea Brucculeri (2019), Gabriel Kay (2019), and Vigenesh Gopalan (2018) to discuss lessons learned at Viget, life after Viget, underrated skills worth developing, tips for remote collaboration and more. The event was open to all and both current staff and other alums sat in on the moderated panel discussion. It was awesome, and everyone – long-timers and interns alike – left feeling inspired. This is my favorite aspect of the internship, our alumni network, and how our interns graduate to be active contributors.

I’m looking forward to staying in touch with Ciel, Faye, and Paul and I cannot wait to see all the wonderful things they accomplish. 

Does this sound like an experience you want to be a part of? We’ll host our 16th cohort of college students and recent grads next summer. Bookmark our internship page to keep an eye on future opportunities. 

When we open an app or website, we do so to accomplish a task or find information. A well-designed user experience ensures users can achieve their goals efficiently. But what keeps us engaged beyond basic functionality? What differentiates a mundane interface from an exciting one? In my opinion as an up and coming UI developer, one key element is motion.

During my summer internship at Viget, I had the opportunity to dive deep into the world of agency work. From getting the chance to contribute to client sites to participating in a hackathon and pursuing a personal project, I seriously leveled up my stack and gained valuable development experience. Not to mention the amount I learned from exceptional, dedicated mentorship and micro-classes on everything from React to SQL to business models. 

However, coming into the internship, I had the specific goal of learning how to add motion to my web projects. I walked in on day one with no idea where to start, and now I’m leaving my last week with a complex knowledge of Rive, canvas elements, JavaScript animation, GSAP, and more. Here’s how… 

Spinet

In this two week hackathon project, I worked alongside Faye and Paul, the Product Designer and App Developer interns, to create a spinning wheel name picker. During the first week, I took on branding and visual design work. 

I spent the second week implementing wireframes. Through this project I learned how to transform client specifications into design directions, a style guide, and ultimately, UI components.

For this app, the motion of the spinning wheel was critical to the experience. Initially, client feedback indicated that the spin felt too uniform. I adjusted the motion parameters by extending the slowdown time and changing the easing function from linear to cubic, which increased feelings of suspense at the end of the spin animation. 

To add a level of joy and celebration to the winner announcement popup at the end of a spin, I incorporated confetti animations. In doing so, I discovered the world of JavaScript animation libraries that make implementing animations as easy as simple as adding the script to my HTML and adjusting the timing and placement of the animation object. Finally, we had ultimately decided on a modern, clean-cut video game aesthetic for the branding, and pulled this in through inspired sound effects, the logo design, and a 3D button component with a click animation accomplished entirely through Tailwind. 

Luna chatbot

After the hackathon, I got the chance to work on a personal project of my choice: an AI mental health chatbot inspired by tools like Woebot and EarKick. I was motivated by the question of what could make conversational AI feel less intimidating and more empathetic. My answer was an AI support companion with an animated avatar to enhance feelings of emotional connection and understanding. 

To get started, I experimented with various chatbot APIs and found that the Llama3 model was the best at following system prompts and offered the most natural interactions. A huge part of this project was the chatbot’s expression animations. I surveyed several popular tools and found Rive was the best fit for this, offering intricate animation capabilities, easy web integration, and a state machine for managing overlapping states and complex transitions.

The first step of animating in Rive is to create a design. Luckily, Rive has a vibrant open-source community, and I learned a lot from examining and remixing community files. The second step was learning to create the animations themselves. This was my first time animating anything, but the concept of keyframes was relatively intuitive, and the UI reminded me of video editing software, like iMovie, I’d used in the past.

The third and most challenging step for me was making all the animations work together in a state machine. 

This is the logic that connects animations together, taking input values that determine when to transition between states. Getting smooth animations between emotional states required a lot of rewiring and experimenting. Finally, embedding the Rive file in my project and linking the emotion data from API responses to the animation inputs was relatively straightforward using vanilla JavaScript. 

In conclusion

Animations, whether simple or complex, add a layer of interactivity and visual interest to digital products. Over a short 10 weeks, my internship projects allowed me to explore UI development, modern animation tools, and motion using CSS and JavaScript.

If you’re interested in bringing ideas to life and sparking joy through motion design, then diving into a passion project, seeking inspiration from the community, and exploring tools like Rive and GSAP will definitely kickstart your journey!

For agencies like ours, success doesn’t come from being an expert at everything—a big part of it is complementing our expertise and working hand-in-hand with like-minded partners who share our values and standards.

These partnerships haven't just boosted what we can do, they've created opportunities for us to engage with new clients. Here's how these collaborations have made us—and our partners—stronger:

1. Incremental Value: We have a deep respect for expertise. We believe If you try to be an expert at everything, it’s difficult to be exceptional at anything. By teaming up with partners who bring different skills and services to the table, we get access to all sorts of proficiencies we wouldn't have on our own, adding value to prospective and existing clients. Instead of “That’s not our area of expertise”, now it’s “Yes, we can help with that.” These alliances empower us to deliver a higher level of service and comprehensive results for our clients.
2. Mutual Scalability: Sometimes, there’s a ton of demand for what we do, and it's hard to keep up. Strategic partnerships mean we can call in reinforcements when we need them. By tapping into our partners' talent pools, we can handle even the most time-sensitive client demands without sacrificing quality or speed. And it’s mutual. When our team has time available, we are the reinforcements instead.
3. More Leads, More Growth: In a crowded market, having a steady stream of clients is crucial. Naturally, every knock on our door can’t be a great fit. Through our partnerships, we've built a network of agencies that share our values, quality standards, and culture. By working closely together and passing leads back and forth, we've created a symbiotic ecosystem where projects flow smoothly, keeping all of us busy and growing.
4. Reaching New Frontiers: Exploring new markets or industries can be risky, especially if you don't know the terrain. That's where partnerships come in handy. With an experienced partner on your team, it cracks open a door to reach new customers that may have otherwise been too difficult to open on your own. By teaming up with others who know the ropes in different areas (e.g. machine learning, hardware prototyping, reputation management, etc.), we can expand our reach, and establish ourselves in new segments with confidence.
5. Getting Creative Together: Innovation flourishes when different minds come together under a set of constraints. By teaming up with partners who bring fresh ideas to the table, whether through smaller things like adding feedback to a partner’s open-source library, or bigger things like discussing AI’s impact on the web, we create a space where new approaches can flourish. (And, well, it’s our namesake after all).
6. Professional Development: Values like “learn & grow” are part of a rewarding career at Viget. The symbiotic ecosystem created in our partner network provides opportunities for knowledge sharing. Partners help us solidify new skills including teaching others. Our own expertise shared with our peers gets reciprocated—each agency broadening the other’s horizons and leveling up one another’s teams. 

In the end, strategic partnerships are an important ingredient in our recipe for success. They give us access to all sorts of perks we wouldn't have on our own, and they help us build a community of successful agencies and contractors who all value the power of teamwork. 

In recent years, as distributed work has become the norm, all-hands trips have become more commonplace. Even companies that have always done them now see their importance in a new light. They are expensive and demanding for everyone involved, but when they’re done well they can be incredibly impactful. Are you bringing your team together and feeling the stress of getting it right? Designing the time together takes strategic thinking, logistics planning, and the confidence to ask everyone to contribute to the event’s success.

Last week, we came together to connect, celebrate each other, and look forward to a bright future in our quarterly all-hands event we call Third Third Thursday or TTT. It was our first in-person all-hands event since May 2023. At Viget, we actively build our culture together. The responsibility doesn’t fall on just a few individuals' shoulders. Our events are successful because individuals show up, speak up, listen, and honor the limited time we have together in-person. This is evident in the chats over breakfast pastries, the all-in approach to competitions breakout sessions, and the peer talks and discussions throughout our events. This connection and camaraderie doesn’t just happen, we work hard to make it happen. 

Reflecting on last week’s event (and 7 years of other events), I want to share these five key planning tips to help you craft a successful event. 

Leverage your physical space to help achieve your event goals. This fall we had a smaller number of attendees and we wanted to encourage discussion throughout the event so we set up the room in large U shape to foster conversation. We also made the most of our exterior space, which featured a fire escape staircase, by hosting an egg drop competition. 

Over communicate, especially around when team members can expect breaks and when they can expect to be fed. As the event lead, I share my phone number multiple times ahead of and throughout the event. We also make sure to communicate in dedicated channels, including an event Slack channel for all attendees, a behind-the-scenes Slack channel for presenters only, and an event website. We share important key information like bus schedules and flight confirmations via email. In advance of the big day, we shared this slide with our team to both inform and inspire. 

Leave room for unstructured time and connection. Over the years we learned that some of the best discussions and a-ha moments come from chats over a meal or a snack during the “unplanned” parts of the event. Now we plan ahead for these, leaving ample time for unplanned, impromptu a-has. We think about airport Uber rides, charter bus rides, morning runs, evening board games, or late-night drinks and look for ways to grease the wheels of serendipity. This was especially important for us this fall since it had been so long since the last time we all gathered together. 

Look for ways to celebrate what is unique to your company. One pretty fantastic thing that comes with a quarter century in business is the community we’ve built along the way. We make a point to keep up with previous Viget employees who we proudly call our alumni. We love our alumni and enjoy recognizing their contributions to Viget. One way we do so is with annual picnics, which we host when the most current Viget employees are in town for an event. These picnics are often a great mix of reconnections and networking.

Find ways to surprise and delight. Think big and small. For example, this fall we put colored pencils and butcher block paper out during our meeting time. Our autumnal decor included blue(ish) and orange pumpkins (Viget colors!). We made a subtle callout to an internal project by serving french fries as our afternoon snack. And we surprised our team with Unreal treats for their bus rides home. The treats served as dessert and a means for us to introduce our next in-person event, our spring TTT, aka Viget25. 

Some companies advocate for all-hand retreats to be social and relaxing, but not “productive.” They tout a meeting-free event. At Viget, we see the meeting time as crucial because that is when peers share knowledge, reflect on their recent work, showcase client impact, and highlight new ideas and personal growth. Similarly, our co-founders reflect on Viget’s performance and share thoughts on the upcoming business direction. The meeting sparks genuine inspiration and creates a time for us to remember what brought us to Viget in the first place – to build world class tech in support of our clients. 

On the heels of a successful gathering, it’s time to start planning the next one. For our next event we’ll head to the Allegheny Mountains where we’ll leverage a unique and memorable venue, offer plenty of unstructured time for connection (with each other and nature), loop in alumni where appropriate, plan inspiring meeting content, enjoy many meals and treats together, and of course find ways to surprise and delight. 

Work-related travel isn't for everyone, but if you know someone who appreciates the idea of dedicated time to connect with and celebrate their peers, we’re hiring. And to all the culture champions and event planners out there, good luck with your next all-hands!