Quest is a marketplace for digital services supported by SMU Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE), and is a portfolio company under Antler. The company focuses on connecting businesses and individuals with the best freelancers, marketers, and locals within minutes, redefining the ways people seek for help in the post-covid world.

After applying to over 10 companies, I managed to secure a position in this startup, and I am fortunate that Quest and her co-founders provided me this opportunity to get my feet wet. This opportunity with Quest gave me an insight with what it means to be a developer in the technology industry, and it was truly a fulfilling one to say the least.

"There's a common phrase in entrepreneurship, small business, and life in general - it's wearing too many hats."

Being a developer in a startup meant that I was able to be involved in the company beyond just my job scope, attending weekly alignment meetings that are held at the end of every week where different departments (business, marketing, design, technology) come together to discuss about the progress and direction that the company is heading toward to.

I had absolutely no prior experience in mobile development, and it took me about a week into the company to get comfortable with the codebase. Thankfully, I was given a relatively simple starter task to get my hands dirty.

As this was my first time being involved in a project with a software development team in a collaborative environment, I have definitely made my fair share of Git and version control mistakes, but thankfully the mistakes were all not too serious.

Because Dart is also an object-oriented language, it was initially tough for me to grasp certain coding design patterns such as object-oriented programming, seperation of concerns, and the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. Fortunately, my colleagues and manager were all very helpful, providing me tips and documentation to refer to whenever I run into a roadblock!

Overall, it was a pretty solid journey over at Quest, and I managed to gain some insights on the software development process, writing clean code, as well as adhering to certain coding design patterns and principles. I am definitely thankful that a greenhorn like myself was extended an opportunity to intern at a company, and one that is no less helmed by 3 other students just like myself.

It was, beyond a doubt, an eye-opening and inspiring experience to be a part of this company's startup journey. Onwards to the next Quest!