Unforgettable 2 months in my life with Go-Squads 2.0
Yesterday was my last day as an intern in GO-JEK (specifically in GO-PAY Team). If I throwback to the first day I joined internship, I can’t imagine how many things that I’ve got from this program. My expectation before entering this internship was like it will going to be great, but I never expect that it becomes this great and beyond my expectations.
It start with the bootcamp (I ever write about it, please read my post about 7 days bootcamp in GO-JEK), and after that we’re given a presentation about 3 projects that we will work on during this internship.
- Error Logging Management
- Linux Container Scheduler
- Centralised Configuration Management
All of the projects (for me especially), require me to learn a lot of things. I never work on them before, and it puts myself to down because I think I can’t catch up with those things. After we were shown about the projects that we will work on, we were divided into 2 teams, and each team consisted of 6 people. Every project must be done in pairs, and we will rotate the couple every 1–2 weeks and do a showcase to show the progress we have made in the project
It turned out that I was wrong, my initial thought made me doubt that I would be left behind in learning things related to the project. Here I begin to see how GO-JEK highly appreciates the learning process. So, before we started working on the project, we were given about 2 weeks to learn about the things in our project. The 2 weeks, really only used for learning, especially to understand what projects we are actually building, and then we are required to document what we have learned, and design solutions to problems that we have understood. We are not allowed to write code (except for training, or explore something), these two weeks are really used for exploration and learning, and after that we have to present what we have learned in the past iteration.
We began to jump in to do the project, a few tiring weeks — but it was amazing. I personally, found many new things in the process of this project. I knew that my partner found out a lot of things that I didn’t know, and vice versa. I learned how to present the best solution for the problems I faced. In the execution of this project, there are many types of solutions that I can implement to overcome the existing problems, but here is the advantage of pair programming. You can exchange ideas with them, you can see other problems that arise that you might not have thought about before. And that is the following weeks, every day you will learn new things here, and that makes you happy because you know today you learn something. We also exchanged pairs, and presented our projects to buddies on GO-JEK.
Long story, we arrived at the last showcase, there was an issue that Ajey Gore — GO-JEK’s Group CTO will be present at the showcase this time. When the showcase started, I was able to see a bit of worry and nervousness arising between us (actually this happened at every showcase), but we were more nervous this time because we knew that Ajey would come and see our final progress at any time. When it was me and my friend Vincent’s turn, actually we made a presentation quite well, everything went smoothly, we succeeded (seemed) to make the audience understand what we had made, and answer other technical questions. But when we almost sat down (and thought this would all be done), someone came behind the door, and you’re right, that is Ajey!
We all laugh, including Vincent and me. Ajey was confused and asked why we all laughed, but we still told him there was nothing. I was silent and thought for a moment, what would Ajey do here. Ajey started by asking about us, what we felt during the internship here, what we did. And of course he also asked a little about my project and Vincent. He asked something about linux container, and he told us to do simple things with the bash command, but you know because we were so nervous we couldn’t even execute simple bash command smoothly! It’s nervous but funny to me.
Ajey said that he could not linger here, because there was something else he had to do. And before leaving he asked us one by one. The question is, what are the top two things you learned during this internship program. Our answers also vary, TDD, Container, Pair Programming, developing communication, and more. Ajey concluded and told us that, maybe the two best things we’ve got here are learning to think, and thinking to learn. For me the meaning of this is very deep. Because without us knowing, whatever we have done and tried to learn here, refers to both concepts.
As engineers — especially programmers, we cannot rely and depend on one thing for a long time. Changes can occur at any time in seconds. This is where the ability that must be possessed and continues to be sharpened, that is learning and thinking. And for me, I am very sure that not only engineers who apply this, but all lines of work, professions, and other things in this life should apply the concept.
I was reminded of the words of one of my Buddy here, that is when humans stop learning, that’s where human existence ends. Actually without us even knowing, from birth we have done learning. We learn to walk, talk, interact with others, and more. We should enjoy this process, because we might not be able to master something so perfectly. But from the things we try to apply and do, we will learn and think to produce something better. This is what GO-JEK wants us to try to share with other people later. Because of this, it will make people around us better. Thank you, GO-JEK for the opportunity that has been given to me, so that I can join this amazing internship program. There is a lot of things that I have got and share here, and I can say that this experience is one of the most valuable experiences in my life, because it has changed my view of thinking and learning, and how important the learning process itself is. Thanks GO-JEK!