My internship experience at Startup Kano

The SIWES program is a program that every computer science student must undergo in this third year of education. This was to provide us with an opportunity to apply whatever we learnt in class, in an actual work environment. It's a 6-month program and we were given log books to record what we did on each day. I did my SIWES/internship at the Startup Kano Hub, and the experience was okay.

So, the internship began on 4th December, 2023. I and other folks from BUK, met with the founder, Aysha Tofa. She told us that we are expected to be at the hub from Monday to Thursday, at about 9AM. She also told us that we will be given a certificate at the end of the program and as a project, we were to make an Android app for the hub. When, I heard that I was happy because I've been looking for an excuse to get into Android development. ¹

I'll be honest, the first few weeks were boring. Everything moved slow. Perhaps it was because of the holiday season (remember, this was December). I kept myself busy by watching a freeCodeCamp course on development Node.js and Express. Backend development is something I am interested in because I genuinely do not think that I am built for frontend development. Skill issue. I know.

¶ An experience I will never forget

Things started to really heat up, right after the Christmas holdays. Icon Farouk, one of the officials there, told us to pick a personal project to work on. We were to take this seriously and act as if we were creating a real startup. He wanted us to right a proposal and all that. I proposed a app/service that I thought would be technically demanding. I really wanted to get my hands dirty

To keep things short, the project was an app that allowed teachers to deliver better online tests. Unfortunately, my proposal was not approved on grounds that it was not profitable. I had to come up with another proposal quickly. I proposed an app that allowed people to find event spaces around them to host their events.

To build this app, I used Next.js and Firebase to handle things like authentication, storage and of course, the database. Holy shit! I really stuggled with Next.js. I knew a bit of React, so I figured that getting into Next.js should be easy. Working with the framework wasn't 'difficult' per se.

Everything just felt overwhelming. I had to handle the UI, frontend, "backend" and deployment. It was my first big project, may be that's why I had such a hard time.

Things definitely got better the more I used the framework. Firebase on the other hand was a pleasure to work with. I didn't have a hard time integrating it into Next.js.

We presented our work some three weeks later. I do not want to bore you with details. But the summary is, we used a projector to show our work to a panel of judges, and we got some feedback.

Yomi Sani was the program manager at Startup Kano. We sometimes held sessions with him on Tuesdays, where we discussed concepts around life, startups and more. We talked about Customer Personas and business model canvases.

Startup Kano is a wonderful place. I met so many gurus. I learnt a lot, and also improved my social skills. If you are a computer science student in Kano looking for a place to intern, I highly recommend Startup Kano.