virtint
Gain real engineering experience before your first job
One thing I've noticed is that most learning paths follow the same progression:
Learn from courses.
Solve coding challenges.
Build a few portfolio projects.
Apply for internships.
The problem is that when you join a company, almost none of your work starts with a blank project.
Instead, you're dropped into an existing codebase that someone else wrote. Your first task is usually something like:
Fix a bug.
Understand why a feature behaves a certain way.
Make a small change without breaking everything else.
Read a lot more code than you write.
Those skills are difficult to develop when every project is your own.
That observation is what led me to create VirtInt.
Instead of asking users to build another CRUD app, the platform gives them an existing repository and assigns a real issue to solve. The challenge isn't just writing code—it's understanding the codebase, navigating it, and figuring out where the fix belongs.
I'm curious what other founders and engineers think.
If you've worked as a software engineer:
What was your first task?
Did your personal projects actually prepare you for working in a large codebase?
If you were mentoring someone today, how would you help them bridge that gap?
I'd love to hear different perspectives because that's the problem I'm trying to solve with VirtInt.
Hi everyone,
I recently launched VirtInt (https://virtint.com), an AI-powered virtual internship platform designed to help aspiring software engineers gain practical experience through realistic engineering tasks.
The motivation behind VirtInt was simple. There are plenty of courses, coding tutorials, and interview prep platforms, but very few places where developers can experience work that resembles an actual software engineering internship.
With VirtInt, users can:
🐞 Debug existing code
💻 Solve realistic engineering tasks
🤖 Receive AI-powered feedback
📈 Track their progress as they improve
The goal isn't to replace traditional internships but to make practical engineering experience more accessible to anyone preparing for their first software engineering role.
The platform is now live, and I'm looking for honest feedback before expanding it further.
-
2
The assumption that stood out to me is that realistic engineering tasks can fill part of the experience gap that courses and interview prep leave behind.
Now that VirtInt is live, are early users coming because they already feel that gap themselves, or are you finding that you first have to explain why this kind of practice is different from what they're already doing?
-
1
That's a great question. I actually don't think the main challenge is convincing people they need it, most developers already realize that tutorials and personal projects only take them so far. They eventually start building projects because that's where they begin to learn how software actually comes together.
The gap is that those projects are usually built from scratch by the same person. In a real engineering role, you're much more likely to join an existing codebase with thousands of lines of code, understand someone else's design decisions, navigate the repository, debug unfamiliar code, and implement incremental changes without breaking existing functionality.
That's the experience VirtInt is trying to provide. Instead of starting with a blank project, users contribute to a larger codebase by working on assigned issues. The issues are intentionally scoped for beginners, but they still require exploring the repository, understanding the architecture, and figuring out the solution independently.
My hope is that this feels much closer to a real internship and gives people a meaningful first engineering experience before they get hired.
-
2
That’s helpful context. The distinction between building something from scratch and learning to navigate an existing codebase is an interesting one.
I’d like to continue the conversation outside the thread. What’s the best email to reach you on?
-
-
Comment