I got a chance to intern at Appsecco for my 8th Semester project on DevSecOps.
Introduction
For as far as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in computers. Soon enough I got fascinated about security in computers. This interest, however, remained at the backburner while I was in school. Cut to when I got into college, I learned more about how things worked in security. It wasn’t long when I decided that when I graduate from college, I should have a job in the security industry.
I’ve fortunately had the opportunity to intern as both, a Security Engineer and a DevSecOps Engineer, at different instances. Both times with Appsecco and hence, needless to say, Appsecco has had a big role in helping me achieve my ambitions.
Switching sides to the Blue Team!
Soon after the summer internship at Appsecco ended, back in college, I found myself looking into all the cool things I learned, and slowly I got more engrossed about how one secures things from the attacks I had just seen in the summer. Since this was my 7th semester, I was looking for 6-month internships and this search soon got me back in touch with Akash. I sent him a mail asking if I could join Appsecco as an intern again, but this time in his team and we got on a call in the following days to discuss certain questions about the internship. Such as what did I expect out of this internship and if I had anything specific in mind that I wanted to work on.
Having had other interviews, I find the way people at Appsecco deal with interviews, is vastly different in the sense that it is always more of a discussion, not a barrage of do-you-know-X type of questions.
Shortly after we had a few calls, I received the confirmation of the internship.
The Internship: Preparation
When I had approached Akash about interning under him and learning about DevSecOps, I had mentioned that I’m a beginner. This, however, was not an issue, Akash was fine with me getting a quick course when I started the internship to get started with basic concepts around the domain that I would need for working on my project.
Eventually, while there was still some time left before my internship began, I wanted to make use of the spare time I had and get a headstart with the basics. So, I asked Akash if I could help me with resources/tasks to get started and then Sunesh and Akash, after a discussion, gave me a few tasks to revolving around Jenkins, performing Static Application Security Testing (or SAST for short) and create a report for the same. I had multiple calls with Sunesh to talk about my progress and resolve the issues I faced and these tasks saved me some time that I would have otherwise spent in the office learning the basics. I, instead, was able to do more learning about the actual work.
The Second First-Day in the Office
Though I had already interned at Appsecco once, still on the first day walking into the office was like having the first-day all over again but the moment I walked in the office I was greeted with familiar faces and the butterflies were replaced with a comfort of knowing (almost) everyone. I found took a desk on the Blue-team side of the office this time. Soon we had a quick meeting with everyone for introductions and the rest of the day was spent setting up stuff for the project, a review of what I had done till now, a few formalities, and some catching up with everyone.
Everyone at Appsecco ends up contributing to each other in some way. Being a small team, I find it really nice that I get to know everyone properly and not superficially. Another good thing that comes out of this is picking up things from others in the team, as I earlier mentioned, in the form of meta-learning. This has led me to become more productive and if nothing else more aware of how well I am performing as per my capabilities.
Be it from writing To-Do notes, learning keyboard shortcuts on VSCode, or something else.
One great thing that I experienced that everyone is so welcoming. The team lunches every Friday is where everyone would discuss everything apart from work like TV shows they plan on watching, movie recommendations, book reviews, and a lot more. This group can initially be really intimidating (unintentionally) because of the experience and knowledge they pack as a team, but I’ve come to see them being very receptive to my opinions and views too. They are all ears to understand where my thoughts come from. If they are right, well and good but if they are wrong, they help me understand why which is a critical step towards learning new things.
