My summer internship at HackerEarth has ended, but the learning over the past two months has been more enriching than any education I’ve ever received. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with one of the most talented startup teams out there. These two months made for one of the best experiences I’ve had so far. And if you ask me how it feels to intern at a startup, here’s what I’d say:
Startup = Growth
True. I definitely feel a sense of personal and professional growth from this internship. The skills I’ve acquired here could only be gained in a startup environment with the help of an awesome team. While I interned as a software developer, I also gained insight into how startups function—how tech companies prioritize goals and iterate quickly with user experience in mind. I also picked up a few other important lessons.
The most important thing I learned:
"Shit happens and will keep on happening. The only thing you can do is minimize it. Learn from your mistakes and get motivated." I say this because I’ve seen things get rectified after going terribly wrong.
I am a programmer, I like to develop
With very little experience in Python, my first task—writing a realtime server—seemed especially challenging. Read more about it at The Robust Realtime Server (Engineering Blog). I also wrote unit tests that made testing a lot easier.
Every task or project I was assigned had immediate relevance to HackerEarth. That meant I couldn’t just sit back when stuck on a problem. I got a lot of help from Praveen and Vivek during the continuous deployment project. Some things went over my head, but working as a team made it fun and educational.
During the last two weeks, I developed an application to monitor the status of various services and backends at HackerEarth.
Here’s a quick summary of what I learned and worked on: Python, Django, Tornado, RabbitMQ, Fabric, Celery, RethinkDB, and AWS.
Work hard, party harder
Fun at HackerEarth isn’t overshadowed by the monotony of corporate life. Whenever we wanted to go out, we just did. Sometimes we worked on weekends and took weekdays off to have fun. Wonderla was one such amazing and memorable trip. I got to try laser tag, go-karting, and rock climbing!
At Wonderla!
It was a summer full of fun, laughter, and hard work. I enjoyed every single day. Now that I’m back in college, it’s going to feel strange attending classes again. I’ll truly miss the time I spent at HackerEarth.
Goodbye HackerEarth, and thank you for the farewell party!
