The co-op
My first development job: a summer co-op with Immigration Canada. The team was building an application for filtering, saving, and sharing documentation. The kind of tool that sounds simple until you realise how many edge cases exist at government scale.
What I worked on
Created mockups, pitched them to the team, then actually built them. Pull requests, code reviews, the whole process. My main responsibility was the favouriting and sharing logic. Seemingly straightforward features that required thinking through permissions, file handling, and user workflows in ways I hadn’t considered before. The biggest growth was learning to efficiently adapt to other people’s codebases.
What stuck with me
That summer taught me more about building real software for real users than any course had. Getting to contribute meaningfully to something people actually used daily felt significant.
I can’t share the actual interface or code, but the images here are an approximation of what we built.