Work Hard and Play Hard as a STOQO Intern
Three Months of Experience Having Fun at STOQO
I want to tell you a story, story about a startup that I didn’t expect would greatly improve myself. The story began on March 18th, I sent my internship application to one of engineer lead Tri Ahmad Irfan at PT. STOQO Teknologi Indonesia. In short, after a conversation with the people operation team and the interview, I was accepted as a Front-end Engineer Intern shortly after that.
At that moment, to be honest, I wasn’t really excited, how can I be more excited being accepted in an ordinary startup especially after I already had an amazing internship experience with one of the unicorn startups in Indonesia before? (Sounds arrogant I know and I’m sorry). But now after going through many amazing processes, I officially admit that I was wrong to underestimate STOQO before.
Work Hard
What I’ve Done Here
At STOQO, I joined the warehouse tech team which consists of some small teams, all teams have a responsibility to ensure the continuous improvement of the warehouse business processes efficiency. To be more specific, let’s say my team’s name is the manpower team because my team and I work in a project called Manpower Management. Our project objective is to improve the efficiency of the warehouse through the maximum utilization of hundreds of the warehouse’s manpower. I used React and React Native framework to implement this project.
What I Got Here
If someone asks me about what I got from my three-months internship experience, maybe there isn’t enough time to explain it. The most important thing is everyone here always emphasizes the importance of learning something new and the importance of daring to make mistakes and learning from them. Armed with just basic knowledge of react and react-native framework at the beginning of my internship, thanks to my mentor Kak George, now I feel I ready to use my react skill on an industrial scale of react project and mid-level of react-native project. Moreover, at STOQO I had the chance to accompany the designer during user research for my project, therefore sharpening my analytical skill.
How is STOQO Environment?
I think the environment at STOQO always supports me to learn something new. Once a week we held an event called STOQO Tech Discussion which enables us to share our knowledge, one of the most interesting experiences here is when Angky invites his friend an engineer from one of the biggest tech companies in Seattle to share his knowledge. I also feel that everyone at STOQO always listens and respects the opinions of others, regardless if they are interns or full-time employees, so it increases the spirit of interns to be actively involved in the project besides just only writing the code. The most interesting thing for me as a STOQO intern is that I got a chance to directly impact the core business process with my work, it makes me feel impactful.
The thing that I really appreciate about STOQO is even though we are not a big company (not yet), we always try to serve as best as we can, every lead is always emphasizing about a sense of ownership to the product. In the tech team, we usually do the sprint demo every Friday after lunch. In the sprint demo, every tech teams present everything that they did in the last sprint, the goal is to ensure all teams know what the other teams did. After that, manpower team and I continue with doing sprint meetings, there are two things that we do in sprint meetings, the first one is we evaluate everything that we did in the last sprint including find out any blocker in our project and figure out the solution for it, the next one is we set the goal for the next week. To ensure the credibility of our quality, every code that the engineers push to production always goes through the code review phase, where every engineer (especially teammates) can check the code and give suggestions. We also set the standard and rules for the code at the beginning of the project, documentation is also the thing that we highly considered. So, I’d say that the quality of the team at STOQO is amazing.
Play Hard
Ok, let’s move on to the fun part. Did I have fun at STOQO? The answer is yes! Thanks to my CTO Angky William who always emphasizes pleasant culture alongside work excellence. I’m so grateful that I got a chance to have a one-on-one session with him which gave me so much insight. He also said that he wants to make a comfortable place for everyone to work. It’s not all talk, either. He actively invites his team to hang out and chill together after office hours. The fun fact is when we are not in the office, I often forget that he is my CTO because he always put himself as a friend even for the interns. As a scientific person, I must give you evidence about my fun experience, so let’s see the picture below.
Eventually, time to say ciao adiós has come. Even though my spirit in this project is still flaming, I have to be honest and say that finishing my studies is the highest priority for me. If one day STOQO and I get the chance to be together again, I’m sure at that moment STOQO will have developed rapidly. Thanks guys for everything that became a part of and improved my life. For you who want to get a similar experience like me, you can visit the STOQO career page and see the opportunity to learn and play at STOQO.
