A little about me
I’m from Cairo, Egypt, and I am a senior studying Computer Science at Western University. I recently came back from an exchange semester at The University of Hong Kong, where I decided to do an internship year before finishing college.
Why Breather
As an exchange student, you start appreciating the different cultures around you, and how they positively influence your way of thinking and your experience. I wanted to extend this appreciation a little more low-level to also appreciate the work culture and the that of the people around me.
So I came up with 3 metrics I felt were most important to me:
- People
- Technology
- City
I wanted to join a medium sized startup in a new vibrant city, with B2B/B2C services that dealt with some high volume of users. While I was on exchange, I had a marketing rush where I sat my Google IQ & Analytics and Hubspot Inbound exams. Inherently, I felt that if a Marketing x Engineering team existed (which it did!), would be perfect.
With respect to people, having a phone/video interview makes it difficult to figure what the actual culture is like. My first impressions were great, when I interviewed with Phil Miller, who was then the Director of Engineering, and with Maribel, the Technical Recruiter. Also talking to Jasmine Wang who was interning at there at the time, gave a good low level perspective of work.
I learnt about most of Breather’s technology stack from my conversations with Phil. I liked how Breather was aware of it’s technical debt with Backbone, and was making gradual changes to transition to React. This particularly interested me since I’d be learning two frameworks at the same time if I was involved with the refactoring (which I was!). In fact, 3 months in, we hosted the Montreal React meet up and discussed our transition, decisions, successes and target architecture.
In terms of the City, Montreal in my opinion is the most vibrant city in Canada, at least top 2... There’s honestly so much to do. From attending PyCon Canada, to events related to Bitcoin, AI and JS and to even social street dances at your local park. In fact one of the other interns happened to have started his own ML startup following MTL AI Startup Weekend.
Onboarding
Breather takes their on-boarding process very seriously. Off the bat we were each assigned a Buddy who could answer our questions and help with our onboarding transition. My Buddy happened to be an Intermediate Engineer in the Growth team.
We spent the first two weeks solving small issues on different parts of Breather’s platforms. I found myself enjoying solving front-end issues. Having a Growth Buddy also helped too, nevertheless this confirmed which team I thought best fit me.
The Growth team by nature is a cross-functional engineering team that works mainly with the Marketing department. As a result, my Product Manager introduced me to the entire growth and marketing teams in the first 2 weeks. In hindsight, this made my work a lot easier as I knew who to approach when I had muli-skakeholder questions for new product features, which was quite often.
Beyond the scope of onboarding, there were also internal events and clubs taking place every week such as the softball, football, yoga and bouldering clubs.
This was a great way to meet people outside engineering in the ~100+ strong office. In the process, I made an amazing group of friends in addition to exploring the Mile End pub/food scene.
Web Engineering
During my first town hall meeting, I remember Julien Smith referenced Breather’s mission: to make the world’s spaces connected, accessible and productive when asked about our post Series-C direction. Inherently, the engineering team’s mission is to make the 400+ spaces as accessible and connected as possible.
My work started with refactoring legacy Backbone pages to React, and thereafter translating new designs to new breather.com pages in React. At the same time, I implemented growth/SEO experiments to breather.com, some of which performed extremely well in our conversion/split tests and have been adopted since.
The last month was dedicated to the intern project. Our vision was to bring the company and its people closer together, by building on the existing trust and transparency with digestible and easy information. We figured that meant building an internal visualization tool for the entire company to oversee Breather’s internal operations and performance.
This tool is on the homepage of Backstage, which is an internal platform that more than half of Breather use daily. As a growth engineering intern, I grew comfortable with our front-end stack, and building out mockups, so I built the tool’s entire front-end.
What I made out of it
I started Breather’s Coding Club, where I taught 5 awesome employees Introduction to Programming. I discovered that I enjoyed teaching, and especially watching others toy with this new magic, called code.
Beyond tech, I also started Breather’s Dance Club. This was a super fun way to learn new dance styles such as Swing and Salsa, explore MTL a little more and meet new people. The best part of this was, the classes were (mostly) free and it was 15 mins from the office. Everyone needs a way to reset after a long week and this was one of mine...
In my free time I demo’ed a new acquisition channel to the company and its management with an internal Breather Slack bot. Slack’s interface is simple, which took most of the ‘front-end’ weight off my shoulders, and allowed me to focus on the user-flow UX of the booking (discovery->booking->invite in 4 easy steps). After the demo, I received a lot of feedback, follow up questions and some even offered help.
What did I take away from the 4 months?
After 4 months of breakfast meme hunting for Breather’s memes channel, this one is my favorite.
It’s not the hours, admittedly it’s a teeny bit of luck, but mainly it’s the planning and making the most of your time which has made my 4 months more than worthwhile.
Thank you to everyone at Breather ❤
