The Non-Code Half of Engineering: Lessons from a Front-End Internship

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Before I moved toward machine learning, my first real role was a front-end development internship at Mandala Infosys in Kathmandu, from April to July 2024. On paper it was an HTML-and-CSS job. In practice it was a hybrid — half building, half translating between what clients wanted and what the technical team could build — and the translating half is where I learned the most.

The build half

The straightforward part was writing the front end. I built responsive interfaces in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: semantic navigation components, landing-page layouts with formatted and optimised imagery, and form pages. It was a normal agile setup — sprint planning, code reviews, iterating on feedback — and it’s where I got my first real taste of shipping something other people would actually use, on a deadline, with someone reviewing my work.

That was valuable. But it wasn’t the part that changed how I think.

The half that mattered

The more unusual side of the role put me between the client and the developers. I’d sit with customers to elicit what they actually wanted from a website — which, early on, I learned is almost never what they first say they want. So I started building small reference builds: quick, concrete mock-ups I could demo, because a vague request turns specific fast the moment someone can point at a real screen and say “not that — this.”

From there I’d draft solution options for the technical team to weigh, and this is where the actual lesson lived: feature prioritisation. Clients want everything. Time and budget don’t allow everything. My job became walking non-technical people through the opportunity cost of each choice — “if we build this, here’s what it costs, and here’s what it pushes out of scope” — so they could make an informed trade-off instead of a wish list.

Saying “yes, and here’s what that costs you” turned out to be far more useful than saying “yes” to everything.

Why this connects to reliability

At the time I didn’t see the thread. I do now. The work I care about today — ML reliability, keeping systems trustworthy in production — is also mostly about honest trade-offs. When I decide not to auto-retrain a drifted model, or keep a known failure visible instead of hiding it behind a nicer metric, or refuse to cite a number I haven’t measured — that’s the same instinct I first practised in a small office in Kathmandu, explaining to a client why we shouldn’t build the thing they asked for.

Build the thing. But stay honest about what every decision trades away. That’s the non-code half of engineering, and it’s the half I’d bet on.

Front-End on Nikhil Adhikari

The Non-Code Half of Engineering: Lessons from a Front-End Internship

The build half

The half that mattered

Why this connects to reliability