My Internship Experience at a Tech Start-Up

Let me begin by saying that I was kind of a novice in this whole “Full-Stack Web Development” scene. So just before my summer break this year, I was in a dilemma whether to rest or to intern at a company working in the same domain. So I decided to intern at a fast moving, high growth tech start-up. 😉

Making it there 👔

Three of my close friends had been interning at a start-up called LIDO in their summer break. They informed me that the people at LIDO were looking to hire more interns. So by their reference, a meeting with the CTO was set up on 3rd July, 2019.

I reached their office in Lower Parel, Mumbai on the scheduled date and had a nice little talk with Nishu Goyal, the CTO. He was very cordial and gave me a basic overview of their vision and the technology stack. Later, my then-mentor and senior developer, Jivitesh Bansal, took my interview. I gave the interview, got selected and joined from the next day itself.

Work 💻

My first few days went in R&D towards ReactJS. My mentor, Jivitesh, had given me a task to add a small feature in one of their ReactJS dashboards. The first few days took quite an effort on my part for understanding the general flow of humongous codebase. But this made me familiar with writing modular code.

After the second week, I was given another task where I had to build a serverless OTP-based authentication system for users from scratch. My prior knowledge of implementing authentication in NodeJS helped me with this task. I came up with a design and started development in ExpressJS. Here my mentor helped me structure, modify and optimise my code according to industry standards in several rounds of coding reviews.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live” — John Woods

Later, I had to move my code to a serverless platform using AWS Lambda functions. This is where I came across the likes of Cloud Computing, Function as a service (FaaS) and Serverless Framework and AWS Lambda functions, API Gateway, SNS. It was an astounding experience to work with AWS products hands-on.

My third task was to develop a feature for tracking of user activity on a ReactJS dashboard. This is where I got to work with Hasura and GraphQL. Hasura provides Backend as a service (BaaS), which makes it easy for using CRUD APIs. Coming from a REST background, it was a little tough for me to grasp the concepts of GraphQL. But I persevered through it and eventually got the hang of it.

As my fourth and final task, I had to develop a fallback system for the SMS service of the user authentication system developed in the second task.

Started from the bottom now we’re here! I was able to learn all of this in a period of 2 months.

Culture 🌈

I had seen the start-up culture in TV series like Silicon Valley and Pitchers. But to experience the vibe first hand was very overwhelming for me. Things I loved here:

• Flexible work hours: I had to manage both — the internship and regular college. Travelling to Lower Parel after college was often tiring and stressful, but my mentor was very understanding and allowed me to bend my working hours as long as work was being done.
• Direct exposure to projects: I got to work on several modules independently while learning new technologies side-by-side.
• “Find a way to make it work” mentality: I loved this mentality which helped keep my curiosity and motivation high.
• Free coffee: Well, what can I say more… ☕️ 😄 🤭

Takeaways 😇

My takeaways from this internship are:

• Learn as you code rather than learn and then code: Got this as an advice from my mentor which made much more sense as I moved forward. You understand and retain the core concepts of a technology more when you learn and code simultaneously rather than watching some boot-camp/tutorial and then coding on it.
• Coding reviews are essential: These reviews will make you feel like you write mediocre code. But these are worth wrapping your head around in the long run. You would rather fix bugs and optimise code in development than in production.
• Planning is advantageous: Planning keeps you focused on the anticipated results, helps you to anticipate problems and cope with change.
• Communication is key: You get so busy with the tech development that you forget to work on your communication skills. Better communication skills help you to interact with the other developers and solve the problem at hand more efficiently. Moreover, you get to learn new things from different people who have more knowledge and experience than you.

Interning at a high growth tech start-up is very demanding and exhilarating at the same time. Working at LIDO made me gain a new sense of professionalism. I am extremely thankful for this opportunity. ✌️ 😃

If you wish to know more about Lido Learning — LIDO is an ed-tech company revolutionising the formal classroom education through a unique and immersive online classroom for every child in India. They’re hiring as well!