Freshman Software Engineering Internship Experience at Stoqo (Part 1)
A story about how I got my first internship and what I got from my internship as a software engineer at Stoqo
About Stoqo
Stoqo is a B2B marketplace + SaaS for small restaurant and hotel owners, helping them bulk-source raw materials at direct-factory-prices and streamline back-end ops, allowing them to focus on business growth. As a buyer’s eCooperative, Stoqo orchestrates curated transactions by aggregating orders, standardising supplies and delivering on-demand for optimum efficiency — LinkedIn
Some of you might not heard of Stoqo yet before. Stoqo is a new startup that is growing at a rapid pace. I managed to land my first internship there. It is my first working experience as a developer as well. Here I would like to share some of my story interning at Stoqo.
The story will be divided into two parts which contains a personal wrap-up story about the whole thing. The first part will focus mainly on my background and the process of me landing my very first internship as a Software Engineer at Stoqo. The second part (see link) will focus mainly about my internship experience and what I learned from it.
Please do enjoy this ordinary story of mine and feel free leave a comment below :)
Grace. That’s one word that I can describe about my first ever work experience at Stoqo as a Software Engineer Intern.
Grace is about receiving things that you actually don’t deserve. That’s what I thought about my 3-month-awesome and life-changing experience here. Why did I mention don’t deserve? Let’s start with me sharing my story prior interning at Stoqo :)
Background (About Me and Motivations)
Part I — Prior to Entering Faculty Of Computer Science
My name is Albertus Angga. I’m a 19 years old student majoring Computer Science at Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia. I was born to family that does not have the chance to pursue academic highly, my father was only a high school graduate and my mother was only a middle school graduate. My father is a poultry farmer and did not have a wide perspective about life outside farming. My family value comfort more than progression, I on the other hand value progression more than comfort. I have firm belief that one day I would move from the city to learn more about life. Speaking of high school, I am the first on my family that study science major. On this period I get introduced to Informatics Olympiad which is the gateway to Computer Science. I got hooked on doing Informatics Olympiad at my freshman and junior year. But things didn’t turn out that well for me. It was hard to maintain consistency and passion to learn new things about Competitive Programming everyday especially when you live in a place where there are no good mentor and teacher who can keep you motivated about the whole thing and there are no structured learning materials as well. I failed twice at the same level, the Provincial Olympiad in Informatics. Expecting a lot of things from Informatics Olympiad actually made me disappointed about my life, so I spent my last year at high school sulking, retiring from programming world in general. But at that time I knew for sure that Computer Science was for me and so I wanted to pursue it as my major in the future. Despite my laziness at my senior year, I received amazing grace in my life. That was getting a chance to study Computer Science at one of the best universities in Indonesia, Universitas Indonesia. I almost failed my university entrance exam because of my lack of preparation. This was caused by me being quite cocky at that time, being so sure that I could get into my preferred university through invitation because of my good grades and some of my achievements. Actually that served as a lesson for me since in the end I entered Universitas Indonesia as a parallel student which causes my parents to pay my tuition fee more compared to the regular students one.
In short: I neither come from family that value academic highly, nor a TOKI alumni. I am just an ordinary guy that is lucky enough to be accepted at one of the most prestigious CS college in Indonesia, UI.
Part II — Entering Faculty of Computer Science
By the time I entered Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia, a lot of our seniors (year 2015) had already been interning a Software Engineer during their freshman year (even better, someone interned in his first semester break). The standard was already risen that high when I entered Fasilkom UI. I heard from my 2013 seniors that usually they started looking for their first internship during their sophomore / senior year.
Software Engineering Internship sounded really intimidating to me at that time. Since I didn’t have any exposure and experience to software development world prior to my second semester at UI when I took Web Design and Development course ahead from students in my year. That’s why I decided not to apply at my winter break like my certain senior did in his first semester, I was afraid that I didn’t have enough skill to be applying for internship at that time, plus I did receive advice from him to focus on honing my development skill first prior to applying for my first internship.
Entering the second semester at Fasilkom UI, disappointed by my unproductivity during winter holiday, I forced myself to take the Web Development and Design course at my 2nd semester despite it being designed to be taken during my 3rd semester. Later on, this decision contributes a lot to my experience landing the internship at Stoqo.
The company name Dekoruma got mentioned a lot in my year when we were talking about our senior internship experience. But, personally for me I heard and knew about Dekoruma because of Ricky (my Foundations of Programming I assistant lecturer) and Fahmi (my Competitive Programming SIG leader at Ristek and my Introduction to Digital System assistant lecturer) had already interned there during their summer break as a Freshman. During my winter break, I saw Fahmi getting tagged in a photo during his internship there at Dekoruma. I decided to like the post, then not so long after I liked the post, kak Michaela Nathania who posted it suddenly added me as a friend! OMG! Who would not be surprised getting added by an important person? So I accepted the friend request and suddenly she chatted me..
I’m still amazed by the fact that Kak Nia added me as a friend back then and she was so friendly to someone like me! Later on, she wasthe one who introduces and refers me to apply at Stoqo. I feel really indebted to her. Thanks Kak Nia 😃 Without you this post will never exist.
The thought of interning as a Software Engineer during a freshman year motivated me a lot, so I asked Fahmi about his experience interning there and I asked for various advices from him as well in February 2017 during our first Ristek weekend KAT meeting at Puncak, especially about the technical process of getting the internship. Still, after hearing his experience and advice I still felt a bit intimidated to apply for Software Engineering internship.
Pre-Internship: How I Got the Internship
Being intimidated too much and having inferiority complex, I was so lazy that I didn’t even have the courage to build a resume since there are nothing to show off about myself! I didn’t have any work experience, any projects, any technical skills. The only good thing about me at that time was my perfect GPA during my first semester which I achieved pure through luck U_U Long story short, after our midterms exam session, suddenly me and my close friends at that time decided to build some resume together and start applying to various company since at that time we have heard that some of our friends were already accepted as a Software Engineer intern in Dekoruma. So, the only thing that I put at my resume are my good GPA, the fact that I took Web Design and Programming course earlier than my friends, and my previous tiny competitive programming and typing achievement. That’s all.
Ok, so I built my resume (attached if you want to see). Now what? Time to apply to various startup companies. Not getting enough experience and exposure to the intern selection process, I decided to just go for it. At first I was interested on applying to Dekoruma, so I built my courage to ask about Dekoruma intern position, but my feelings and intuition told me that Dekoruma’s position for this summer are full. So to confirm that, I tried to ask to Kak Nia. My feelings were right, Dekoruma internship position for this summer were already filled. But, being so kind, kak Nia told me about the internship opportunities at Stoqo :D
She mentioned the CTO, Angky William had worked at Amazon.com (US) before, and my well known senior who interned twice at Silicon valley will be joining Stoqo as well. Who would not be motivated to work with smart people with amazing backgrounds like that? OMG. This team’s background are so good that I was sure there are a lot of things to learn from them, and I was right, I learned a lot from them later on :). I was really motivated to apply after hearing about Stoqo from kak Nia. Later on she gave me Stoqo’s CTO email, then I sent an application directly. Here is my application email that I sent to Stoqo 😀
The Interview
4 hours later I got a reply from ko Angky and we arranged to met up the next Sunday morning. The next Sunday morning, I met ko Angky for the first time ever when he was having one-on-one meeting with kak Irfan. This is the first time I speak to kak Irfan as well since he didn’t know me prior to this meeting even though I have recognized his name since I was at highschool since he is really famous.
We talked a lot and ko Angky asked me a lot of question about me, my background, and my motivation also. After having good talk suddenly he decided to give me interview question and made me code it directly in paper in front of him and kak Irfan as well. I thought that I messed my coding interview since my solution were buggy and not so perfect as well. Even though I thought that I did pretty well compared to my usual sloppy side, I knew that I was not good enough to pass the interview. My code did contain some bug and it was noticeable enough that ko Angky pointed out the bug for me.
Finally, after 2 hours of talking and having coding interview, ko Angky told me that he would tell me about the result of my interview by that night after discussing with kak Irfan.
The night, I got message from ko Angky that he would like to assess my learning curve by giving me small project to learn Angular framework, so in case I got accepted and on board on this team, I would be able to start the intern project faster as well by learning my first framework.
I’m really grateful for this opportunity. Before, I had no clue at all at that time about how front-end frameworks. At all. If I were only assessed by my coding interview alone, I think I wouldn’t pass since I’m really sloppy and tend to mess things up when I’m nervous, plus I didn’t prepare that well, who would prepare well on their freshman year anyway? Later on this project helps my on-boarding experience to be more delightful because learning another framework wasn’t as hard as my first.
So, ko Angky decided to give me a small project to develop a website using Angular v4 with provided RESTful API and JWT authentication system, the design were provided as well. So all Ihad to do was just research, study, then implement the code. The deadline were 2 weeks because I said that I had no clue at all about the frameworks, about Angular, about RESTful API, about JWT, about everything. My CSS at that time were really so bad as well even though I claimed Idid have some proficiency on it.
I spent my first day setting up Angular environment, researching things, doing the Angular tutorial until it all made sense, it didn’t though. At that time I had learn native JavaScript from my Web Design and Programming course, but I didn’t even know the existence of ES6, the arrow function or something similar. So i struggled learning the Angular as well since there are a lot of ES6 and TypeScript included there.
The next day, ko Angky told me to push the project as soon as possible since he were going to finalize the offer if my learning curve were good. Motivated by this, I pushed myself harder.
I spent like 2 days just researching and doing the Angular tutorial. At the third day i started working on the project. At the fourth day I almost completed all the projects requirements. At the fifth day, I completed the project, push the code to Git, and showed it to ko Angky.
The next day, at midnight, suddenly I got a casual message from ko Angky. I got the offer. It was really one of the best things that could have happened in my life.
At that time, there were already 3 interns accepted at Stoqo. Three of them are TOKI-alumni (Informatics Olympiad Medalist). In the end Iwas the sole intern in tech division who isn’t TOKI-alumni. Technical-wise, I’m the weakest among the Tech division here. But let me share my perspective as the weakest programmer among the team in the next post :)
Three of them got the offer after having coding interview (meeting with ko Angky once) before they were given a small project for on-boarding experience. But it was not that way for me. I got the project first before even getting accepted. I do feel grateful because I was given a second chance to be reconsidered. That’s why in the beginning of this post I said that I actually don’t deserve this. My first internship was really a grace.
So that’s my story about how I get my first internship at Stoqo. Please do read the next part as well!
