The Internship: Freedom to Explore
By: Stephen Ou, Stanford
We asked our summer interns to describe their experience working at CodeHS. This three post mini-series will explore their real thoughts about what it was like to read, write & code.
Hello! My name is Stephen, and I was a Software Engineer Intern at CodeHS this past summer. Two things I want to highlight are the team’s culture and my freedom to explore.
The internship at CodeHS was my first ever internship as a future software engineer. Before I started, I wasn’t sure how much I would learn from a small, fast-growing company where I assumed everyone would be constantly busy. As it turned out, all of the team was willing to help out the interns. I got to see how the process for feature development works and learned all about code review. I was exposed to other engineer’s coding style. I finally understood why it is so important to write clean, modularized and maintainable code. On top of that, I got to observe how a start-up sales process works, which had always been a compelling mystery to me.
The internship process was very well set up and documented. The first morning, I got a detailed overview of how the company is run and started the a bootcamp program to learn about the surprisingly large codebase. At the end of my first week, I completed the bootcamp program and was familiar with the structure of the codebase.
I had the freedom to have an opinion on the projects I worked on. Jeremy and Zach, co-founders of CodeHS, took the initiative to ask what I was interested in, and assigned projects with those interests in mind. I ended up working on multiple projects that continue to play out in my mind. I am sure I remained motivated and focused every day because I enjoyed the projects I was working on.
The highlights of my internship were the monthly company hackathons. CodeHS holds an internal hackathon once a month where all team members spend an entire work day to build whatever they want. Projects are usually outside of people’s area of responsibility so a lot of cool ideas are brought to life. During my first hackathon, I built a web app that streamlined the company’s weekly planning process. During the second hackathon, I created a Slack bot that printed out a random worklog.
Overall, my internship experience really exceeded my personal expectations. If you are a college student reading this post, I highly recommend applying to be an intern at CodeHS!
About the Author:
Stephen Ou is a Sophomore at Stanford University majoring in Computer Science. His hobbies include photography and cooking. His favorite programming language is Python.
