Behind the Screens: Solution Street’s First All-Remote Internship 2020

It is now a four-year tradition at Solution Street to invite the young and brightest to join us for a summer of hands-on web development and consulting experience. Our interns have released a variety of applications for different businesses from basketball training and timesheets to content management and catering. We pride ourselves on helping them grow from rookies to budding full-stack developers following industry standards not only as coders, but also as team members and consultants.

Historically, this has all been incredibly hands-on and in person, with intern supervisors and team leads as well as Solution Street employees popping in and out of conference rooms, conducting whiteboard sessions, mock interviews, and even occasional philosophical conversations over a game of foosball. The 2020 quarantine caught us off guard. As the internship was approaching and interviewees were getting approved, the big question was looming more and more: do we cancel and cut our losses or step into this new world of teleconferencing? After several weeks of deliberation and planning, we reached the decision: Game on!

The first challenge we had to conquer was making sure everyone had Solution Street laptops for their development purposes. While easy in theory, this becomes quite a task when the laptop has to be…