Introduction

Over the course of the fall I worked with the wonderful people at TD Lab as a solutions developer. TD is a major bank across canada and the USA. I worked at TD Labs which is a part of TD innovations and research sector primarily to come up with financial solutions to student problems by students.

Goals

Hackathons

I wanted to improve my creative skills during hackathons, coming up with new and interesting ideas that would solve problems with very simple solutions. Working in a startup environment allowed me to have more freedom when it came to coming up with ideas and how we built them up which was amazing because it taught me so much about ideation, design, testing and market fit. I was able to place 2nd In both of our hackathons which was a great feeling and excited me to do more outside of work.

Presentations

Improving my ability to present is vital for working in companies big or small. Over the course of the semester I made it a goal to work on my presentation skills to my fellow co-workers and other members of the company. By doing so I would have a great advantage over others. It allowed me to get my ideas across more effectively and be more confident in a presentation setting. Every week we would have to come up with a presentation to see what we have been working on during the week to keep the team updated. We also had to prepare a big presentation for the inovations board to show what we worked on and allowed us to connect with other people in the company to make our products a reality.

Flutter and Dart

The project that I was working on was primarily done in the language Dart and used the mobile development framework Flutter which was created by google. This framework and language are extremely new and there isn't an answer to every question on stack overflow. This forced me to do two things that I have never had to really do before which was 1. read documentation and 2. read source code. Since flutter and dart are both open source you can look into their code bases. If the documentation for the widget your using doesn't act as documented you simply look at the code and figure it out. This deep dive into the frame work gave me a real appreciation to what people do behind the scenes of some of these open source projects and gave me a better understanding of how to structure and read others code.

Job Description

My primary role at TD was to work with the mobile peer to peer team to develop their app. Although this was my primary job their were so many other things that I did like; doing market research, building furniture, going through design sprints, doing user testing and so much more. The open endedness of TD's work environment allowed me to get a greater understanding of how tech should be done in a startup environment, how to get things done with the limited resources at hand and have a great time doing it.

Conclusion

My experience was amazing. It taught me so much about the software development life cycles and actually being a part of scrum meetings even leading a couple was really fun. I'm extremely proud of my progress with Flutter and my presentation skills as we did a presentation with a board of innovation at the end of the semester. Working with really fun co-workers and coming up with new and innovative products was a blast, although TD is thought to be an old and unfun bank job working at TD LAB was the best experience I have ever had and would love to work with the team again in the future.