My internship at Very Good Ventures: Dennis

This past summer I was given the opportunity to work at Very Good Ventures as an Engineering Intern where I was able to dive headfirst into Flutter app development. During my three months at VGV, I refined my programming skills working on open source tooling used both internally by VGV and by the Dart and Flutter community. I learned a lot about writing flexible, easily testable code and the importance of well organized project architecture. Here are some highlights from my internship.

From day one, it became evident that at Very Good Ventures, quality work was a priority. Rather than being thrown headfirst into a project to figure things out on my own, I was given a very thorough week of onboarding where I learned all about the fundamentals of Flutter and the company standards for app architecture. This onboarding experience involved working through several well-documented tutorials as well as meeting with various team members. This extra effort put into onboarding made transitioning into open source work fluid and less stressful.

Once I finished onboarding, I started off my internship working on various open source projects with other VGV interns. From there, my focus transitioned to Very Good CLI, where I worked on expanding the functionality of the create command. The CLI uses Mason internally to generate projects from various “brick” templates offered (read about Mason here). My contributions to the CLI involved adding support for a custom organization name, expanding the templates supported by the CLI, and adding an auto-update feature whenever the CLI gets run. In addition to working on the Very Good CLI, I also contributed to a new feature on Very Good Start, VGV’s enterprise-grade Flutter starter app.

Prior to interning for Very Good Ventures, I interned at BMW where I worked on automating cloud resource deployment using tools like Terraform and Kubernetes. Coming from this background in cloud infrastructure, I felt the transition to using Flutter and having more of a focus on app development was refreshing. I personally enjoyed the extra room for creativity and the satisfaction of being able to see my contributions directly in open source libraries.

All in all, my three months at VGV gave me a strong foundation in Flutter app development and helped me hone my overall programming skills. I’m glad I was given the opportunity to be a part of the amazing team at VGV and plan on continuing to work in the Flutter and Dart ecosystem.

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Read about what it's like to work at VGV from other interns.