By: Cartier M.
At the beginning of this summer, I thought I was coming into Coded by’s Tech & Innovation Internship to learn more about technology. By the end of it, I realized I had learned something bigger: there is a difference between knowing how technology works and actually knowing how to build something with it.
Before this internship, most of my experience with technology came from school, personal projects, and experimenting on my own. I had written code, built websites, and worked with different tools, but most of that work was either individual or structured around a specific assignment. I usually knew what I was supposed to build before I started. The Tech & Innovation Internship was different. For the first time, I was part of a team where the problem was not completely defined for us, and where the final product actually mattered to other people.
That uncertainty was one of the hardest parts of the summer.
Learning What it Takes to Build
My team was given the opportunity to create something around athletics and technology. We eventually developed an idea centered around personalized feedback for athletes. The concept sounds simple when explained in one sentence: an athlete does a workout, receives feedback on their form and performance, and immediately gets the opportunity to try again. But turning that idea into something real required much more than writing code.
We had to figure out what the product should actually do, what information mattered to an athlete, what would make the experience feel personalized, and what was realistic to build within our time constraints. We had to make decisions without always knowing whether they were the right ones. That was probably the biggest difference between this internship and anything I had done before.
I learned that building a product is not just a technical process. It is a constant process of making decisions with incomplete information.
There were definitely times when I wanted to focus on the technical side because it felt easier. I could spend hours thinking about which API to use, debugging a feature, or trying to get something to work exactly the way I imagined. But throughout the summer, I became more aware that a technically impressive feature does not automatically make a good product. Sometimes the better decision was to simplify something, remove a feature, or focus on the part of the experience that would actually matter to the user.
That mindset changed the way I approached our project.
One of the most important things I learned was how much iteration matters. We did not build our final idea perfectly on the first attempt. We built something, tested it, realized what was weak, changed it, and built again. That process became normal. Instead of seeing mistakes as evidence that something had gone wrong, I started seeing them as part of how the product was supposed to develop.
That was especially meaningful when we began working on our live feedback experience. We wanted the athlete to actually experience a cycle: do the workout, receive personalized feedback, and immediately have the chance to do it again. The point was not simply to give someone an AI-generated answer. We wanted the technology to create a feedback loop that could help someone improve.
That idea also changed how I thought about AI. Before this internship, I mostly thought of AI in terms of what a model could generate or analyze. This summer made me think more about what role AI should play in a product. The interesting part was not just that AI could analyze movement. The interesting part was figuring out how that analysis could become useful to a real person.
Growing Through Collaboration
Working on a team taught me another set of lessons that I could not have learned by coding alone.
I was used to working independently and figuring things out myself. At Coded by, that was not always possible. We had to communicate, divide responsibilities, explain our decisions, and make sure our work connected with everyone else’s. A feature that worked perfectly on my end was not necessarily useful if it did not fit into the rest of the product.
I became more comfortable asking questions, explaining technical ideas in ways other people could understand, and accepting feedback without becoming attached to my first idea. I also learned that collaboration is not simply dividing a project into pieces and completing your own piece. It is making sure all of those pieces become one coherent thing.
The internship also gave me a more realistic understanding of what working in technology looks like.
There is a version of technology that is easy to imagine from the outside: sitting at a computer, writing code, and eventually seeing the finished product. This summer was much messier. There were bugs, changes in direction, ideas that did not work, decisions that had to be revisited, and moments where we had to figure something out without having a clear answer. I found that I actually enjoyed that part more than I expected.
Confidence in the Unknown
One of the biggest changes in me this summer was becoming more comfortable with not knowing.
I used to think that being good at technology meant already knowing the answer. Now I think it is much more about being able to find the answer.
There were plenty of times when I encountered something I had never worked with before. Instead of viewing that as a limitation, I became more comfortable learning as I went. That shift has probably been more valuable than any individual technical skill I gained.
When I look back at the beginning of the internship, I think the biggest difference is not that I know a certain programming language, framework, or tool that I did not know before. It is that I now understand the process of turning an idea into something real.
I entered the summer thinking that I wanted to get better at technology. I am leaving with a much stronger interest in building.
That distinction matters to me because I do not think I want to spend my future simply using technology that other people created. I want to be involved in the process of creating it. Whether that eventually means software development, startups, AI, product design, or something I have not discovered yet, I know that I enjoy taking an idea that does not exist yet and trying to make it real.
The Tech & Innovation Internship gave me the opportunity to do that for the first time in a serious way.
It also gave me something that is harder to measure: confidence. Not the confidence that I already know everything, but the confidence that I can figure things out when I do not.
That is probably the biggest thing I will take with me from this summer.
I started this internship wanting to learn about technology. I am finishing it wanting to build with it.
_____
The Tech & Innovation Internship gives high school and college students the opportunity to receive hands-on experience in a fast-paced, innovative startup environment, gaining valuable skills and the chance to make strategic connections in the tech and startup industries.
The 2026 internship was made possible thanks to our sponsors: Aberdeen Charitable Foundation, The Hamilton Family Charitable Trust, Target, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Comcast NBCUniversal, Bank of America, (Be) Philly Foundation, KPMG, and Seer Interactive. Interested in sponsoring Coded by: programs? Reach out to our development team.
.png)
.png)
