Meet Etsy’s 2019 Interns!
From daily kombucha runs on the ninth floor to inspiring talks from our peers on Engineering Day, our summer at Etsy has been nothing short of amazing. In these past three months, we’ve gained exciting real world experience and met amazing friends. We’ve used awesome technologies to make an impact on audiences that touch Etsy’s products every day, both internally and externally. Keep on reading to hear about our individual experiences, and some advice from this year’s college and NYC Code Nation interns!
Jonathan Briggs • Web Platform
UC Berkeley 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Building New Internal Admin Toolbar with React
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The culture at Etsy is incredible and I love the people that I had the chance to work with. I also learned SOOO much — both about programming and about myself!!
Which Etsy listing do you resonate most with and why?
Definitely would go with any of the fruity booty enamel pins https://www.etsy.com/listing/536892702/fruity-booty-enamel-pins?ref=hp_rf-3&bes=1) but especially the banana one.
Ethan Chiu • Checkout (Payments)
UC Berkeley 2022 • Website, Github, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I created a new feature that shows an inline billing form underneath the credit card form for both new buyers and guest users, created a feature that shows the billing address and allows for users to change it on the last review step, optimized the Empty Cart Recommendations, refactored various JS/PHP code in the Checkout codebase, and squashed various bugs.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
“This is a difficult CodeLab. Don’t worry! Let me see how I can help you!” It’s my 4th day interning at Etsy and I’m working on the Super CodeLab, a coding project that all new hires are given to learn the Etsy web stack. I was stuck on fixing a bug in JS. So, out of frustration, I vent to my mentor on my team, Stumm, telling him what I’ve done to debug my issues and how I have no idea how to move forward. Stumm patiently asks me to explain the issue and walk him through how I have been debugging. After, he gives me some tips on how to work efficiently throughout the codebase and how to debug on JS using the Chrome debugger tool efficiently. After a few minutes, I was able to fix the bug! This is just one small example of how helpful everyone has been at Etsy. I’ve grown and learn so much as a programmer since day one. Etsy’s supportive culture has helped empower me to create features with many different factors as well as debug difficult issues efficiently. Over the course of my internship, I’ve seen myself grow into a much better programmer and person. After my internship at Etsy, I would say I’ve become better at breaking down complex problems, navigating around the codebase to debug issues, and communicating my ideas!
What will you miss the most?
One aspect of my Etsy internship that I will miss the most is exploring the city with the other interns at Etsy! From going to comedy and late night shows to exploring central park, I’ve had an absolute blast exploring NYC with an amazing group of friends. At Etsy, I’ve also developed a strong connection with my team Checkout! I had the pleasure of working with Stumm, Cedric, Gilbert, Lakota, Hawa, Emma, Phu, Juni, and Aditi. They are probably the smartest and coolest people I’ve ever worked with. I’ll miss working with them!
Kat Chai • Ads & Insights
Brown University 2020 • Website
What did you work on?
I worked on the Shop Stats page on the Seller Dashboard which lets sellers know things like how their listings are doing, where their traffic is coming from, and the number of views and visits they’ve gotten for their shop as a whole. We’ve got some exciting updates planned for the page to make it more intuitive and easier to use!
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Getting to work on a great team with incredibly passionate, driven, and helpful people! My team has been super supportive throughout this whole internship, and I’m really grateful for their help in answering all my questions and giving me a lot of guidance during the summer.
Which Etsy listing do you resonate most with and why?
https://www.etsy.com/listing/673880417/pre-order-javascript-visual-studio?ref=shop_home_active_1&pro=1 I think it goes without saying why I resonate with this spiritually.
Jayesh Kaushik • Analytics Engineering
UC Berkeley 2020 • Website
What did you work on?
This summer, I augmented A/B testing on Catapult, which is our internal testing framework at Etsy. My project allowed users to filter experiment results by multiple segments. This allows users to view aggregate data for specific regions, groups of users, and/or other populations to conduct better analyses on their experiments. In the process, I worked on upstream processes in the Catapult data pipeline, and learnt about experimentation, the data infrastructure at Etsy and the Catapult codebase. Besides multiple segments, I made several improvements to Etsy’s data infrastructure such as making our workflows more robust, creating more accessible channels for our stakeholders to access data, and doing maintenance on tables in Vertica.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Collaborating with my fellow interns, learning from engineers (both on my team and outside), and soaking up Etsy’s open culture has been such a blast. My org especially embraces this — each day on Data Engineering, there are new challenges to investigate, learn about, and explore together, which has been therapeutic for my curious soul. I also especially enjoyed all the lightning talks and workshops on Engineering Day, but If I’m being honest, the happy hour was probably my favorite part.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Future interns — look around you! It is easy to get bogged down by tickets and your projects, but it’s equally as important to seek out the people and opportunities you want to learn from and seize them for yourself. When I look back on my internship(s), I am especially fond of the 1:1s I set up and the meetings/talks outside of my orgs. that I attended. Not only did I end up learning about things I never would have otherwise, but I also had the chance to feel closer to the company’s culture and come to work with a fresh perspective each day.
Melanie Sawyer • Payments
Columbia University 2020
What did you work on?
I worked on building out the 3D Secure authentication flow ahead of new European payments services laws, which will soon come into effect. In order to make transactions more secure in Europe, certain cards may require additional authentication and identification from a bank. Authenticating credit cards is in fact very complicated and the number of possible edge cases is nearly infinite, so I had a chance to contend with some of the complexities of online payments.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The Etsy office overlooks the Brooklyn Bridge, which doesn’t allow trucks because of the height restrictions of the stone towers. Sometimes, though, a lost truck finds its way on the bridge and ends up having to back up off the bridge (to the ire of all the other cars trying to drive over the bridge). At Etsy, these occasions are documented within the slack channel #stucktruck. There’s also a stuck truck camera that can be queried at any time. I spent many hours watching stuck trucks.
Was there something about how Etsy Tech works that surprised you?
I was surprised that so many engineers here genuinely like PHP, and even more surprised that by the end of the summer I started genuinely liking PHP as well.
Michael Sandborn • Advertising Experience
Vanderbilt University 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Etsy Ads launch! In an effort to ease the advertising burden on Etsy sellers, I contributed (with the support of my amazing team) to multiple user-facing React apps to create a simplified experience for sellers looking to advertise their listings and market their shops on Etsy.com. My work included styling and overlays, error handling and Reducer actions, budget input verification, currency translation, and handling campaign states for sellers with varying levels of experience/timelines advertising on Etsy.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Working with so many incredibly smart and friendly people. Everywhere I turned there was someone doing amazing work and willing to drop everything to help me with my own. The culture at Etsy is extremely unique (especially as an intern), and I believe anyone would be hard-pressed to find anything else like it.
What was the most memorable moment with the rest of the interns?
Friday’s on the roof!
David Knopov • BizData (Data Engineering)
Tufts University 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
This summer I worked on the Data Engineering team here at Etsy. During my time here, I worked on a lot of different small projects. The first project I had was to add several new features to a very popular internal tool here at Etsy. Next I helped to write a script that rebuilds indexes for elasticsearch, a search engine used at Etsy in a lot of different ways. The last project I worked on was a Data Pipeline project. All of these projects were amazing and different in their own way, and I really learned a lot!
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The highlight of my time here has been meeting all the amazing people who work here. I have made great friends in the intern class, and have been mentored by every person on my team, as well as all the people who I have come to with loads of questions. Living in New York for the summer and being exposed to new ideas that blossom both at Etsy and in the city has been an amazing part of my development as I enter senior year.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
I think a lot of people get caught up in just doing the work put in front of them during an internship because they feel like that’s what would make their internship a success. But I think a successful internship has to do more with learning, meeting new people, and really thinking about what you like and what you don’t like about certain things in a project and a working environment. In 10 years I probably won’t remember my work done on that internal tool, or that script I wrote. I’ll remember the people I worked with and the big lessons I learned here at Etsy.
Andrew Cunningham • Search Infrastructure
University of Massachusetts Amherst 2020 • Website, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I worked on a project that sets the foundation for enhancing the shop search experience. On top of being able to exact match shop name searches, we now also extract searchable terms from within shop names.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The highlight of my Etsperience(TM) has been a combination of the meaningful work I get to do every day and the wonderful people that I do it with. The company culture here has really reflected the mission of Etsy to keep commerce human/support one another.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Make time to meet with people and own your experience here! I believe this is one of the best internships out there because you have the ability to have ownership over impactful projects, surrounded by people that want you to succeed. Befriend those people! You can learn a lot from a coffee break. It doesn’t always have to be about what you’re working on here either. People here have rich life experiences that they’d be more than happy to talk about so that you can learn and grow. Taking some personal breaks to chat with people is not only allowed but it’s encouraged in our one-on-one culture.
Pranay Neelagiri • Continuous App Progress (CAP)
Rutgers University 2021 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I worked on Etsy’s iOS Buyer App by adding features and improving the native experience. As part of the CAP squad, I got to work on a complete cart redesign that was being developed on iOS and Android and got to watch it be released on both platforms. I also developed various user-facing features to improve the user experience for Etsy’s mobile app buyers.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
My favorite part of my Etsy experience has been all the people who I’ve been able to meet and interact with this summer. My team (CAP) is made up of some of the most amazing people and engineers I’ve ever met and they’ve taught me so much throughout the summer. Everyone I reached out to for help was always willing to spend some time with me in order to fix the problem and make sure I understood what was going on. And finally, all the other interns this summer have really made this summer great. They were amazing friends from day one and I’m glad I got to know them this summer.
Was there something about how Etsy Tech works that surprised you?
Etsy relies a lot on A/B testing in order to improve its products, both on the web and on mobile platforms. As an iOS engineer developing user-facing features, I found myself having to leverage Etsy’s internal analytics tools in order to turn a feature on and off as an experiment. As a result, I became very familiar with setting up experiments using feature flags, and I’ve been really surprised at how detailed and specific experiments at Etsy can be. For example, if there was a feature that should only show up in the mobile app for iPads running versions 5.28–5.30, Etsy’s experiment configuration tools would allow us to do that. The sheer variety of restrictions and filters that could be applied to experiments at Etsy is amazing, and I know I have barely begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible with these tools.
Vishal Shah • BizData (Data Engineering)
Case Western Reserve University 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I worked on the Rex/Airflow project. This involved rewriting Rex, a tool that schedules rollups each night based on dependencies, to improve logic as well as investigating the best practices for running Rex on Airflow.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
My highlight would definitely be the people that I have had the chance to work with. My team has been phenomenal in helping and just creating a comfortable working environment.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
There are many ways to prove yourself in an internship at Etsy, not just with your technical skills. Your attitude, willingness to learn, and overall character can take you really far. Taking the time to schedule 1:1s with your team and other employees at Etsy can teach you so much more about work, life, and yourself than your code might.
Alan Guo • Core Buyer (External Landings Experience)
Carnegie Mellon University 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
A/B experiments on Etsy’s market page that were targeted at improving conversion rate and GMS, experiments run on the listing page for SEO (search engine optimization) impressions, and general team-oriented bug fixes and tickets centered around the landing experience and SEO at Etsy.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
So far its definitely been the team I’ve worked with! Having been at three different internships, the team at Etsy really has been a league ahead when it comes to mentoring and nurturing young devs early on in their career. You don’t hear sighs when you ask for help, people love to answer questions, and pair programming happens on a seconds’ notice all the time. It’s really made my experience here at Etsy stand out miles above the rest.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Don’t limit yourself to just your teams work! There’s so many things to do here at Etsy, find out what some working groups are doing and try to involve yourself there, hang out with other full-times while playing smash. You can learn so much if you put yourself out there and expand your horizons past what a normal “internship” is supposed to be like. Go big and learn!
Jason Dong • Machine Learning Infrastructure
Case Western Reserve University 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I worked on usability improvements for our internally developed feature engineering platform. I also implemented different feature transformation algorithms, helped reduce some GCP spending, and prototyped a RNN Etsy shop name generator for the intern hackathon.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The people here are the most down to earth humans of all time. Everyone is super chill, but also passionate and incredibly smart. I’ve made lifelong friends in the 12 weeks I’ve been here and I can’t emphasize enough how inspiring it is to work here. I’m not saying this is the best work environment ever but I’m saying this is actually the best work environment ever.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy Intern?
Say yes to everything. It can feel daunting to have so many meetings in your calendar, but just say yes. Agree to help out as much as you can because before you know it, the summer will be over and you’ll just want to come back!
Albert Jin • Customer Resolutions (CURE)
UC Berkeley 2020 • Instagram: @alberttjin
What did you work on?
I worked on adding listings to our vetting tools: Apollo and Spotlight. This allows our support team to be able to decide which listings are okay with being marketed, without having to make the same decision for the whole shop.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The interns, my team, and the city! I loved everyone I worked with, everyone was super nice and smart, and I got to explore one of the best but dirtiest cities in the world ;)
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Don’t be afraid and have some confidence. Just because you are an intern doesn’t mean you can’t review PR’s, and make sure to ask questions when you don’t understand. You are bothering your coworkers more by being confused than by asking what you don’t get. 2. Explore the city, go to events, do things with other people 3. Discover useful debugging tools at your internship early on.
Jack Choi • TEST
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020 • Github
What did you work on?
Resolve database dependencies among PHP tests.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience? 1:1’s with various people around Etsy.
What will you miss the most?
Comfortable environment.
Emily Koagedal• Core Buyer (Pathfinders)
UC Berkeley 2020• LinkedIn
What did you work on?
I worked on the Pathfinders team, which focuses on the best ways for a buyer on Etsy to find the right items for themselves, or even items they didn’t know they wanted! Specifically, I worked on the My Purchases page for mobile web to add a Buy This Again button and added some redesigns to increase frequency.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The best part about working at Etsy has been the culture and the people that make up this amazing company. I think the support system, especially being an intern, is amazing and you really feel that the people here care about the product they are making and about the people they are working with. Another favorite aspect of my my Etsy experience has been the Crafting labs which is an area in the office that has any type of crafting tool you could think of. A couple of the other interns and I picked up knitting and now we are all making scarves!
What was the most surprising aspect about working at Etsy?
I love how Etsy’s office in Brooklyn embraces the Etsy values in all aspects. Most of the furniture and wall decorations are from Etsy sellers themselves, and you can really tell that a lot of thought and care was put into the crafting of this work space. I also think it is amazing how all of our food and snacks are locally sourced to support local food businesses as well!
Rivka Ligier • Conversations
Hunter College 2020 • Website, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Built out part of the sms integration for users to receive text notifications when they receive a message or response to message they started.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Getting a feel for what it’s like to work as a Software Engineer in the real world. I learned so much and everyone was helpful and encouraging.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Do not be afraid to ask questions or for help when you’re unsure or stuck on the same thing for more than an hour! I did this a little bit in the beginning and it did not do any good for me. Your team understands that this is a learning experience and actually wants to help you learn and grow. Also, before you do ask for help, make sure you’ve tried everything possible and have done your own research. This will be helpful when approaching them.
Kyle Chua • Marketing Tech (Content)
University of Southern California 2020 • Website, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
This past summer, I got to take ownership of impactful, consumer-facing work. My two main projects were overhauls of Etsy’s [affiliate marketing page](www.etsy.com/affiliates) and [mobile landing page](www.etsy.com/mobile). I also helped build out features on the Shop Manager Dashboard, and did some work with integrating third-party services into our tech stack.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Definitely the deep-rooted culture of mentorship and collaboration. The engineers on my team were fully-invested in making sure I got the most out of my internship; as a result, I finished my summer at Etsy feeling like I learned a ton!
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
Be confident, ask lots of questions, and enjoy NYC as much as you can!
Neha Dabke • Core Buyer (Visuals)
UC Berkeley 2020 • Github, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
On Core Buyer Visuals, I got the chance to make changes on Etsy’s most trafficked page- the listing page! Core Buyer Visuals’ focuses on making sure Etsy highlights our amazing items as best as possible. This summer, my team took on the task of fully redesigning the listings page- a daunting project, but a really exciting one to be a part of! One of my favorite projects that I worked on this summer was a feature that appends listing variations to the listing URL, allowing users to share links with variations pre-selected. I got to work with a whole host of languages, from PHP to CSS to JavaScript!
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The people! From my fellow interns, to my team, to the many amazing folks who were kind enough to meet with me, the culture at Etsy was a definite highlight. Etsy has an incredible 1:1 culture, and I was able to have really meaningful conversations with Etsians outside of my direct team, like pairing with an analyst on her natural language processing project or having a Q/A session with Mike and Josh, our CTO and CEO!
What advice would you give to a future Etsy Intern?
You are not an island! I had this idea that being a good engineer means never having to ask questions and figuring everything out yourself– but that’s not at all the case! Even if you know how to do something, talking to teammates gives you new perspective and can guide you to being an even better engineer. This applies to people beyond your team as well– Etsy is absolutely teeming with people who can teach you something, and importantly, are more than happy to share their knowledge with you!
Wei Chen • Marketing Tech (CCA)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020 • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Worked on a proof of concept with the CCA team to integrate a customer data platform into Etsy’s current marketing flow using Java and KafkaStreams.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
The people that I met and interacted with.
What will you miss the most?
The mandarin oranges.
Nyesha Jones • App Development (Code Nation Intern)
City Tech 2023 • Instagram: @https.nyesha, LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Beta Testing BrowserStack Mobile, Updating the IOS Sticker Pack on the Etsy App, Creating a BrowserStack Request Command in the Slack Channel.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
I would have to say everything here was a really great experience, The people, the environment and the workload. all the projects I listed may have seemed like a lot but all in all they were challenging but not to the point of giving up on the entire project.
What was the most memorable moment with the rest of the interns?
Even though I’m apart of Code Nation and didn’t really meet the other interns besides Vishal and Ethan, I really liked the Presentations that Sarah invited us too, where we got to see what the college interns did over the summer. Going into college myself it was cool to see what they did and how everybody got along with each other also. I had a good time with the Code Nation interns as well, I really liked when we wrote vine quotes on the dry erase board in the stand room on the fifth floor, that was a good time!
Olivia Dyke • App Development (Code Nation Intern)
The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem • LinkedIn
What did you work on?
Throughout this internship I worked on the App development team using BrowserStack to beta test, then using terminal to write a command for IRCCat (that isn’t yet finished) using PHP and some SQL, and then worked on updating the IOS Etsy Enterprise stickers on the Etsy app which should come out in 3 or so weeks.
What’s been the highlight of your Etsy Experience?
Just being able to learn to dive right into being an Etsy Employee and being able to do work that’s meaningful to the company and its people. While simultaneously getting to meet/connect with the people who work here. Additionally, learning to not be afraid to ask questions when you’ve tried and don’t know, there’s no harm in doing so because the end result is gaining knowledge.
What advice would you give to a future Etsy intern?
To not be afraid or hesitant about reaching out for help. Many of us don’t know things, and lots of Etsy employees learn on the fly. More often than not, people are willing to share what they know, and even tell stories and experiences. There’s no harm in asking because in the end you’ll just gain more knowledge, and learning is what helps to mold you into who you’ll become.
