2017 Internship Week 1

“I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

– Thomas Edison

This is my second year working as an intern for Develop Digitally, and it has started off as a blast.  Like last year working as an intern with this company is like working with google. This is so because I always  get the chance to be learning while trying to solve problems, which at first seems difficult, but after solving that one problem it's like learning about 10 more things along with how to solve that problem.

In the first week of this year's Internship I was given one task to finish.The task was to upload a website that I was building on my local computer onto a web server. This task may sound very simple and I thought it was very simple myself,  but really it wasn't.

Thomas Edison gave a full description of how my first week working with Develop Digitally as an intern was like. In getting the website up on the server an ssh client would be needed to perform the task. To use an ssh client on Linux Operating System was simple but for windows it was a bit difficult to find a working client. On the first day I had the challenge to find a working client as the website was on Windows. I eventually found PowerShell OpenSSH,  getting it up was easy but another problem appeared in the process of login into the server. This problem was due to password login not being enabled on the server and that was quickly fixed.

As time passed I got the files for the website up on the server and imported the database. At that time I thought I was done and nothing else was needed to be done, so i went to my browser and tried to go to the link where the website should be found. To my surprise i got the world renown 404 website not found error. After rechecking if I missed a step in the process I realize that I didn't change the database name and user detail inside of the website files. Fixing that error finally got the website up, but all the problems where not gone. I encountered even more problems, such as:

• It was impossible to login or go to any section on the webpage otherwise from the front page. This was due to not turning off "url fopen" on the server php.ini files and Php curl not being installed.
• At this time I thought I was done and solved all the problems. I was encountering many problems and the process started to feel tedious.

Then i meet the "final boss". This problem posses the greatest challenge and took the longest to solve as not many persons online has encountered this problem before. The problem was that none of my admin css and theme css was loading. I searched all over the internet for methods to solve the problem and checked the website logs, but no method worked . Then my mentor stepped in. After showing him the error and some time searching and testing we finally realize it was due to the /files directory on the site not being readable by the server, and also the caching file was been pointed to the previous cache file on the server that the site was running on before.

After a million problems and not giving up I got the website working on the server at its full potential. It can be found at data.developdigitally.com. Now its just to maintain it. In the process I have learned many different ways, many different aspect about a web server and things to check when putting up your website and securing it on the internet. In the process I had even created a powershell ssh aid that made logging into the ssh server much easier than before as well as uploading your files to your server. I really do believe it would become of much help to persons who uses the ssh server method and person who are also planning on using the ssh server method.  I placed it as a project on gitlab so that it can be developed for linux users and also become much stronger and helpful in making ssh server process easier and faster.

My first week working for this company was great and I had learned a lot in the process.

Looking forward for what adventure the next week takes with it .