GO-SQUADS Tech 2.0 Internship Recap

It’s been around 2 months since my last blog post. This marks the end of my internship at one of Indonesian online transportation service startup — GO-JEK. This 10-week internship has really taught me a lot of things in both of technical and non-technical aspects. Wonder what’s inside the internship? Here’s a blog post about what is inside my very first internship at GO-JEK.
Mini Coding Bootcamp
This is the first thing they gave us to GO-SQUADS. This was a not-so-mini bootcamp that was held for about one week. However, this has taught us a lot of things both in technical and non-technical aspects. This is where I learn what is the best practices in software engineering, especially what is currently being used by GO-JEK, pair programming, and last but not least is about communication skills. These are very important because we — as engineers — must work in a team where communication skills are very fundamental.
If you want to know more about what I’ve learned during this mini coding bootcamp, you can find out about it right here.
Projects and Showcases
A day after the last day of mini coding bootcamp, we are immediately exposed to the projects for the two-month internship. There are three projects and most of them are about infrastructure tools that related to system engineering in GO-JEK which are quite new to me and also challenging. That’s why the team that consisted of 12 people were split into 2 groups consisting of 3 pairs.
We work on two-week iterations. Each of pair in a group worked on different project in each iteration, getting different experiences of using new tools, programming languages, and frameworks as well. We also do pair and project rolling for every iterations. Therefore, we also got experience on working with different people and different experience on working on different projects.
Of course, we’re not alone by ourselves since we didn’t have much experience on working with infrastructure tools. We’ve also got buddies who would accompany us on doing the projects. Each buddy is assigned to a project so that each pair can ask anything related to the project, discussing about the tools why should we use this or why shouldn’t we use that, etc. I found that discussing our projects with our buddies really helpful since I had no experience on creating infrastructure tools which are related to system engineering.
At every end of the iterations, we also do a showcase. This is where the non-technical skills are trained and used. We are forced to talk and present something about our previous iteration. First things first, we are told to tell the audience about what we had learned during our previous iteration. This is a very important thing to us as software engineers, since we’re working in tech and that means we have to learn every time. After that we had to tell the audience about what we had done in the previous iteration and also to show something about the project/product we were creating to the project owner and also our buddies.
“Working in Tech means learning all the time” — Ajey Gore, CTO of GO-JEK
One-on-One Mentorship
Yes, we do learn all the time, as I’ve said before since we’re working in tech company. However, we don’t only learn about technical skills, because in the internship we’ve also got a mentor from GO-ACADEMY Team who would help us develop our non-technical skills. We were allowed to choose from provided non-technical skill areas which kind of skills we were about to improve. There are a few kinds of non-technical skill areas such as giving feedbacks, responding to feedbacks, talking in English, self-development, etc.
Through a periodic meeting, I found this really helpful since I have a few problems on improving kind of skills. This is because in each meeting, we are told to do something small like doing a small talk to people, asking people’s opinion about yourself, etc. In here, I learned a way how to improve those kinds of skills like taking baby steps, start with small improvements. That way, you will get used to the activities you do and that activities will have a greater impact on you.
Life at GO-JEK
In GO-JEK, interns are treated as they were full-time employees. That’s why we also got life which full-time has also got. The engineering working culture in GO-JEK is very dynamic. Engineers are allowed to come at any time they want as long as they still join the daily stand-up meetings. Engineers are allowed to work wherever they feel comfortable at, including the pantry, GO-PLAY area — where we usually play games — , or even the GO-SLEEPING room. However, this kind of freedom doesn’t make us forgetting our responsibilities.
When it’s getting dark, we also do some leisure activities. Usually, we go to the GO-PLAY area to play some games, like playing the pool, table tennis, air hockey, or arcade games like Daytona USA, Ninja Assault. This creates a work-life balance to our daily lives and that’s another reason why I love working here.


It’s a wrap! Now the internship period has finished and I have to go back to college again for my final year. It is an amazing opportunity to have an internship at GO-JEK, I really hope that you can get the same experience as I did. Last but not least, I want to thank GO-JEK especially GO-ACADEMY Team for giving this amazing opportunity and helping me developing my non-technical skills. I also want to thank the buddies for accompanying us along this internship. And also I want to thank my friends from GO-SQUADS Tech 2.0 Team for helping me during all of the projects and helped me on my self-development.
This is my internship experience. What’s yours? #infinitelearning #goacademy