My first technical internship.
I hopped off a plane from Tokyo on Sunday, May 14th around 3:00 PM and started my first ever Software Engineer Intern position on Monday, May 15th at 10:00 AM. I think I still haven’t fully caught my breath since then, and I’ve loved every moment.
I have been working at a Downtown Vancouver innovation lab called Momentus. They do a lot of really cool stuff. No, seriously, Momentus seems to always have some sort of cutting edge super cool project going on. In an average year, Momentus ends up shipping over a dozen different projects.
In my four months here, I’ve had the pleasure of delivering two projects, and am currently working on a third. I came into this internship a blank canvas, having never worked in a technical role, with very very little development experience. The extent being my class projects, and my attempted contributions at hackathons. I learned NodeJS, Kotlin-based Android Development, and dabbled in React during my time here. I built and delivered an entire Android application from the ground up. I attended a Google conference. I learned enough about Chatbots to write an entire tutorial and web series on the topic. I’m currently soloing the development of a full on application and working closely with a real live client.
However, I feel these things are trivial. Any engineer should be capable of picking up a language or learning about a new technology with relative ease. The real biggest lesson I learned about building software is that nothing is magic. There are no sorcerers behind the scenes at Google, Facebook, Momentus. At the Google conference I attended, I had the opportunity to hang out with and chat with engineers from companies all over the city…. and I realized they’re just normal folks. That was… super cool for me to discover. Don’t feel inept, don’t feel incapable of doing whatever you’re doing, because even the smartest people who you look up to likely don’t have a clue what’s going on. You set a huge goal and you learn how the hell you can bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Everyone is learning and trying their best, and sure some may have more domain knowledge than others, but the difference between you and your CEO is probably less than you’d imagine. Everyone is just trying their hardest to do their part. That bridges to my next big observation…
Amazing code does not build amazing software, amazing people do. Ultimately, every software company is looking for the most amazing people. Not necessarily the ones with the highest grades and the biggest brains, but instead those with the biggest hearts and the quickest problem solving skills. I have loved every moment here at Momentus because I love the people I work with. My co-workers are some of my best friends. We could all be working together painting fences and I’m sure it’d be just as great a time. I don’t quite understand how one could choose to work remotely (without any crazy circumstances around it). Team bonding and cohesion is so key to success. It’s really hard for me to put into words how much these folks mean to me, but here’s a quick and well deserved shout out. From Filip & Cayne’s patience and mentorship in teaching me how to be a solid engineer, Anindya’s life-lessons and guidance, David’s deep discussions on building underground passageways and why crystalized coffee is godlike, Eddy being a true jack of all trades, Shahriza’s half-portion of mashed potatoes, Halley & JL’s shoe game, Serge’s confidence-boosting, Jason’s course on Git, Jeremy’s quirky comments, Cynthia looking out for me, Johnny’s Johnny Points (and keeping our office so well stocked with snacks and drinks), James’s encouragement and pushing me to do my best, and Loki’s OG BUCS stories. Lastly, I can’t even begin to touch on how much Stefan, Mitch, and Meichi’s friendship has meant to me. I never thought I’d meet some of my best friends this Summer, but here I am truly sad to not be able to hang out with you all day.

Another super unique experience I gained at Momentus was working through a company acquisition. After my first week here, Momentus was acquired by Softvision, a relatively large software company with offices all around the world. As one can imagine, shifting from being a ~40 person company to being one of a half dozen global studios for a large company is pretty significant. I can’t touch too much on this without crossing boundaries, but getting to experience this first hand was pretty eye opening and I’m glad I was here for this.
Now, here’s what I want my fellow undergrads to know. There’s no secret sauce behind anything, no magical formula. I’m not sure if it’s like this across faculties, but at least within Sauder and the Computer Science community there seems to a ton of pressure to work at the ~best~ jobs. You hear people gossiping in study areas about so-and-so who is interning at Microsoft or Google and wonder where you went wrong and why you’re not capable of that. You are capable of whatever you want. I came into university pretty damn confused about what I want to do, with no software skills. Up until my last blog post (which you may or may not have read here), I was still pretty unsure. At this point, I’ll be honest, I’m still not quite sure what I want to do. However I have a much better idea of what I don’t want to do, what I value, and a better sense of what I enjoy. I intend to continue trying new things, pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I’m really excited and motivated by what I’ve taken away from this Summer, and am going to work my ass off to be where I want next year. Thanks for being apart of the journey.
Feel free to message me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter if you’d like to chat about anything!
For those wondering what I built… I worked on three projects. The first project was a chat bot using a combination of technologies, namely API.AI, Twilio, and writing a back-end in Node. Momentus has a really cool proprietary technology called the Smart Mirror, which is Android-powered. I developed two Android applications in Kotlin, which included tying together APIs for live-data, e-mailing services, real-time communication with store associates, and more.