AWS Internship Daily Log · Daniel Mastick

The dailies

Daily log

What each day actually held, one line at a time. Names are replaced with roles and internal details are left out; the private notebook keeps the rest.

WEEK 15 days filed

MON

Jun 15

First day. Team standup, met my manager and my co-intern, worked through onboarding trainings.
Read the project scope and booked my first meetings.

TUE

Jun 16

Onboarding buddy intro, new-hire sessions, intern welcome lunch, badge pickup.
First questions to my mentor about the project spec and the AI tooling.

WED

Jun 17

Culture 101 and intern cohort sessions; met two more engineers on the team.
Started reading the platform's authoring and replication docs.

THU

Jun 18

IT onboarding sessions, plus a readout directly relevant to how gated content flows through my project.
Cloned the repository, set up the build workspace, started the local environment.

FRI

Jun 19

First manager one-to-one.
Local setup got tangled badly enough that restarting from scratch was faster. Logged it as a loss.
Worked through the replication API and the content model.

WEEK 25 days filed

MON

Jun 22

Set the week's goals: local environment plus authoring-UI familiarity.
Configured local development credentials, then walked the authoring UI the way an author would.

TUE

Jun 23

Mentorship meetings and intern one-to-ones; met more of the team.
Local environment fully running. Installed the CLI tooling, set up sprint tracking, incorporated reviewer feedback on the project plan.

WED

Jun 24

The day the project changed shape: the feature already existed, so the work became extend, not build.
Wrote the design document end to end, built three architecture diagrams, chose the technical approach.

THU

Jun 25

Manager one-to-one and a learning session.
Design-doc polish; built the risk register and the open-questions list.

FRI

Jun 26

Independent refinement day.
Documentation pass on the codebase notes; mockup iteration on badge placement inside the 72px bar.

WEEK 35 days filed

MON

Jun 29

Documented the full codebase map and ran the research phase as five parallel investigations, each verified against source.
Fixed the diagram overlaps. Scoped the hardest signal down to a first-release version and recorded why.

TUE

Jun 30

AI program kickoff and a spec review with the PM.
Built this tracker: the dashboard, the daily log, and the journal CLI.
Recovered the research doc after a tooling failure ate it.

WED

Jul 1

Design review with my mentor surfaced five discussion points.
Sat in on an operational postmortem readout, useful for seeing how the team separates root cause from symptom.

THU

Jul 2

Folded the design-review feedback into the doc and reworked the mockups.
Documented the gating signals and the wording constraint that follows from them.

FRI

Jul 3

Holiday, Independence Day observed. No work.

WEEK 45 days filed

MON

Jul 6

Sprint planning and team demos.
Resolved all five design-review points into the doc, each verified against the codebase.
Week-4 deliverable hit: design document complete and reviewed with the team.

TUE

Jul 7

Set up the design-tool integration and iterated on the mockup.
Prepped the design-review invite with context so nobody walked in cold.

WED

Jul 8

Built the HTML and CSS mockup from scratch: the editor shell, five status badges, and the acknowledgment dialog with a publish-drift timeline.
Recreated it in the design tool for side-by-side comparison.
Week-4 deliverable hit: dialog wireframes done in both tools.

THU

Jul 9

Weekly manager one-to-one, and an intern cohort sync I organized.
Mockup refinements: badges stacked on the right edge, deactivated state added.

FRI

Jul 10

Broke the project into tracked tasks with copy-ready descriptions.
Built a humanizer pass and cleaned the whole journal with it.

WEEK 55 days filed

MON

Jul 13

Ran the team design review. 38 comment threads triaged and all 29 agreed edits applied the same day.
Traced the content-gating stack end to end. Mockup revision 3: click-only panel, production fidelity.

TUE

Jul 14

Mentorship check-in and a high-level design review of the backend approach.
Sketched the endpoint response contract for the first change.

WED

Jul 15

Consistency review across all three project docs; applied all 14 recommended edits.
Refreshed the tracker to the revised requirements. Exam practice at the AI program office hours.

THU

Jul 16

Organized and ran design review 2.
Researched endpoint registration options ahead of implementation. Added the project to my resume.

FRI

Jul 17

Weekly one-to-one.
Drafted the first change's approach on paper and wrote out its failure modes before writing any code.

WEEK 65 days filed

MON

Jul 20

Sprint planning.
Read through the codebase to plan where the changes land, and wrote up where each requirement lands in the code.

TUE

Jul 21

Mentorship check-in and review scoping against the design doc.
Mockup pass on the two edge-case states.

WED

Jul 22

Out sick most of the week. No implementation progress, logged as a loss.
A light documentation pass was all the energy allowed.

THU

Jul 23

Broke the second half of the project into tracked subtasks.
Midpoint review prep: pulled the story together from the docs and mockups.

FRI

Jul 24

Completed the midpoint self-review form.
Built the midpoint review deck from the mockups and the design doc.

WEEK 76 days filed

SAT

Jul 25

Planned the implementation phase as four sequential code reviews, each standing on its own.

MON

Jul 27

Midpoint review with my manager: walked the self-review and the project progress.
Started the first change on a branch and drafted the test matrix before the tests.

TUE

Jul 28

Mentorship meeting.
Wrote the sync-status and attribution logic by hand; drafted test cases against the endpoint contract.

WED

Jul 29

Rebuilt the task board: nine scoped tasks with copy-ready descriptions.
Self-review pass: read my own diff looking for my own bugs before anyone else saw it.

THU

Jul 30

Weekly one-to-one, then turned the plan into a readable task board.
Backend unit tests written out.

FRI

Jul 31

Got the full project running locally, every module active.
Verified the endpoint against the running instance rather than only against mocks.

WEEK 85 days filed

MON

Aug 3

Sprint planning. The first change committed on its branch.
Merged both review passes into one fix doc with no duplicate findings, and migrated the project docs to the team's newer doc tool.
First-reviewer findings verified with the suite green.

TUE

Aug 4

Mentorship meeting, and a leadership ask-me-anything for the intern cohort.
Applied every second-change review finding and re-ran both test suites.

WED

Aug 5

Weekly intern cohort meeting.
Drafted the second change's fixes by hand from the review findings.

THU

Aug 6

Adversarial review on the second change: eight verified findings, one a genuine fail-open defect.
Wrote the review doc so the second reviewer starts warm, including the eleven refuted candidates.

FRI

Aug 7

Weekly one-to-one.
Implemented the fixes, cleared the leftover TODOs, and added a solutions doc pairing each bug with its fix.

WEEK 91 day filed

MON

Aug 10

The second change committed: the badge layer on the editor bar.
Completed the final self-review and prepped the final presentation narrative.
Tallied my AI-assistant usage for the summer from local session data.

The ledger

Meetings and one-to-ones

Every meeting logged, by role and date. Who they were with stays in the private notebook.

Onboarding buddy2026-06-16

Mentor sync2026-06-16

Onboarding buddy2026-06-17

Team member2026-06-17

Office hours2026-06-18

Manager 1:12026-06-19

Team member2026-06-23

Product / program2026-06-23

Mentor sync2026-06-23

Team member2026-06-24

Mentor sync2026-06-24

Manager 1:12026-06-25

Product / program2026-06-30

Mentor sync2026-06-30

Mentor sync2026-07-01

Manager 1:12026-07-09

Intern cohort (organized)2026-07-09

Design review (organized)2026-07-13

Mentor sync2026-07-14

Team session2026-07-16

Manager 1:12026-07-17

Team session2026-07-20

Mentor sync2026-07-21

Intern cohort2026-07-22

Manager 1:12026-07-27

Mentor sync2026-07-28

Manager 1:12026-07-30

Team session2026-08-03

Mentor sync2026-08-04

Team member2026-08-04

Intern cohort2026-08-05

Manager 1:12026-08-07

The brief

Project brief

n editor bar for AWS Marketing's publishing platform that keeps authors honest about publish state: whether the page matches production, whether someone else changed it, and whether it is live yet.

Goals

A visual indicator that stays in sync with the live website
Surface whether someone else made changes
Show whether the page is live yet

Stack

Frontend JavaScript + Coral UIBackend Java + Apache Sling servletData Content-repository propertiesTests JUnit + Jest, plus end-to-end

Deliverables

Bar states: in sync (page matches what is published), out of sync (modifications since last publish), and scheduled (launch-sensitive content that should not be published yet)
Last modified: who and when
A notification flow when you open a page someone else changed since last publish, with an explicit Acknowledge and Continue step

Planning

Weekly goals

The plan the internship ran on, week by week.

Onboarding. IT setup, orientation, one-to-one cadence set, meet the team (Jun 15 to Jun 19)

Environment + UI. Local environment running; familiarity with the authoring UI and replication APIs (Jun 22 to Jun 26)

Research. Research findings documented; approach designed (Jun 29 to Jul 3)

Design. Design document reviewed by the team (Jul 6 to Jul 10)

Backend (midpoint). Midpoint review; the status endpoint returning page-state data (Jul 13 to Jul 17)

Frontend. Bar indicators and the notification dialog functional (Jul 20 to Jul 24)

Implementation. Four-review execution plan; the first change and its tests underway (Jul 25 to Jul 31)

Edge cases. Edge cases handled: locks, concurrent edits, scheduled launches (Aug 3 to Aug 7)

Testing. End-to-end testing on the beta environment; author feedback incorporated (Aug 10)

W10

Wrap-up (final). Final presentation and handoff documentation