The co-op
Four months as a junior full-stack developer at IRCC, my first proper dev job. The product was an internal tool for staff dealing with immigration centres: providing, viewing, and managing forms. The team was nine people, sprint-based, and I picked my own tickets as often as I got assigned them.
What I worked on
Designed mockups, pitched them to the team, then built them. Vue on the front, C# on the back, both daily. My ownership was the favouriting and sharing logic: custom API endpoints stitched into the team’s proprietary systems, with permissions and file handling sat underneath. Less heroic than it sounds, more “thinking carefully through who can see what.”
My last week, I shipped a single huge PR as the “here’s everything I did” goodbye. My boss was strict. He liked it. Minimal feedback post-audit, which felt like a small medal.
What stuck with me
I had braced for intimidating. It wasn’t. The team was warm, the work was real, and weirdly it felt easier than school, because the problems were practical rather than rubric-shaped. I can’t share the actual interface or code, so the images here are an approximation.
Got to contribute to something that mattered for real people. Lucky to have landed there.