Tale of a Wintern Soldier
Summing up my journey to the South.
Hey Wenny, are you out of your mind?
In the midst of completing my final project as a student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science — during which I should regularly meet my lecturer and attend classes in Bandung — I daringly applied for a 40-hour-a-week internship in Jakarta. That means that I should travel from Jakarta to Bandung back and forth, in the midst of the highway construction, every week or so.
People started asking, “Are you out of your mind?” — to which I replied with, “I’ll manage. There are weekends, and working afterwork, it’ll be fine”. After all, I thought that when I have more food on my plate, I would be more eager to finish them all. When I know that I have limited time, I’d procrastinate less.
So as a complement of only taking 4 credits on my 8th semester, I took the courage and searched for an immersive experience. A different kind. The kind that wouldn’t just add a few lines on my résumé, but a mind-grinding, life-changing, meaningful one. Still unclear myself about the specific kind of experience I’d like to gain, I narrowed it down to 3 points.
- Learning to swim, in the sea.
What I think is lacking from school assignment is: best practices. More often than not, time constraint hinders us to actually apply the best practices we have learnt from lectures. A week’s agenda is usually filled with 1 to 5 deadlines, and in some cases, even more. Combined with poor management, this is probably the number one reason as to why many school assignments are chaotic — development or management wise.
I wanted to learn the best practices by being in a team that adheres to them. I needed to see how the experts do it. How they strive to maintain their system. How they tinker with their codebase to substantialise the product team’s requests. The techniques they use to maximise the uptime. I’ve never been to a Disneyland, but I’ve read a lot about it. If I want to build the best theme park in the world and use Disneyland as the role model, it would be much more effective to buy a ticket and experience it firsthand rather than reading blogs and searching for pictures on Instagram. If I want to swim in the ocean for the rest of my life, I need to get out of the neighbourhood pool and start packing up my waterproof sunscreen. - Amount of work I’ll be responsible for.
I would be working on my internship project alongside my final project, means that I should find a place where I’ll have enough responsibilities, but can also take some days off to travel to Bandung and attend classes. That means that I’ll have to find a company who wants to accept me with the luggage I was carrying. - My significance in the work itself.
The usual big fish small fish consideration. Making impact is certainly very fulfilling. Pushing a bug to production? That’s an impact! But make sure you learnt something from it. I wanted to find a place to learn and to apply the skills I’ve learnt. A place to make mistakes and to prevent those I’ve made before. A place where I could grow and acknowledge that I’ve grown. A place like….
STOQO.
What is STOQO? This was my first question when I saw STOQO’s hiring poster my friend shared on LINE. So like what everyone does, I googled it. STOQO is an online B2B staple food distributor (or “sembako online” as I usually refer to). Oh so just another e-commerce startup. Okay. Fine. Nice. Thank u, next. Wait why do they have hygiene products?
Interesting.
So STOQO wasn’t just a staple food distributor, they are an everyday go-to restaurant supplier. STOQO had a blink-blink team background — which I found out after I joined. I applied and was contacted directly by the tech lead and we scheduled an interview right away. The first round of questions was about my final project. My. final. project. I’ve had almost a dozen interviews before and that was the first time someone asked in-depth inquiries about my final project. From my POV, this means that they do care about my interests. It made me think that I won’t be just another intern pumping out new features, I had a hunch that they will cater what I personally want to learn. After discussing further, it seemed that STOQO will be fine with my second criteria. Then came the coding interview and more discussions about my résumé. I felt comfortable talking to Irfan (Mr. Tech Lead). He was nice and helpful in the interview process. A few days later, I was informed that I got the offer!
What I did at STOQO
Unlike what I imagined, I was given quite a big responsibility. Just a few weeks after I joined, I was told that the only front-end engineer on our project will be focusing on another project and we were left alone with only Mika and me. That means that if I cannot match the pace of development, I’m doomed. This is where I thought I had the chance to grow. I mean, now it’s up to me whether I want to name my variable permission or passport. It’s up to me to decide when to use promise, callbacks, and async/await. It’s up to me whether I want to create subfolders for my components or just cram it all directly under components folder. How could they trust me this much? I was just an intern.
Here’s an overview of the day-to-day life as an intern at STOQO. I wake up at 8, or sometimes later, do my morning routines, and begin marching South. STOQO’s office, at that time, was at WeWork SCBD. An hour or so on the road, with the jam that follows Jakarta’s MRT construction. I start my day by making coffee, and sometimes get lectured about always mixing sugar in it (forgive me guys). Then I sit on my desk beside the full-length window, check whether my diff (if any) has been reviewed, scroll through Slack, and sift through the calendar. If there is any meeting where I’m out of context, I try to find more information. Then I tackle some tasks till around 11.30, and on to the daily stand up — which includes 3 attendants: Mika, me, and my plushie Grizz.
At lunchtime, I grab the pre-ordered lunchbox, and also pick lunch menu for the day after. Then I code again, attend meetings if any, then code again. Sometimes I get surprise tasks like doing a research for third party APIs, or fixing bug on backend with constant guide from my O-o-O mentor on the phone. Mind you, I suspect he remembers every line of code in the back of his head. Then I head home at around 6 p.m.
Or maybe on some occasions, the team feasts together! Ayam Geprek, Sushi, Japanese BBQ, other people’s uneaten lunch, Indomie and Nintendo Switch, you name it. We were even planning to have regular afterwork sports day. Badminton, jogging, or just walking to a nearby food festival. You’re looking for work-life balance? Say no more.
What I learnt at STOQO
Over the course of 3 months, I have joined 2 teams in creating platforms to serve and gain information for the users. Not only learning about how to code a clean UI with an intuitive UX, I witnessed the usage of database locks and how they once messed our system up for a short period. I learned a few things about testing and monitoring. I learned much more about purpose and goal.
Like the first criteria stated, I tried my best to always find best practices in writing my code. Can we write the code more elegantly, can it be further simplified without trading readability. Anticipating so that the next person developing this won’t have a headache reading my code.
“When you’re writing code, always try to imagine this. If you have amnesia, and you look at the code you’ve written, will it click right away? Will you understand what you’ve written, in a matter of seconds?” — Mika.
STOQO has this ideology, called the Stoqology. It consists of 3 things: growth, ownership, and integrity. We believed that we want to grow; but not without directions. We believed that ownership and integrity are the main catalyst of growth. And from what I perceive, Stoqology were really applied, at least in the engineering team. We own up to our mistakes, and said no to the blaming culture. “What can we do to fix it?” instead of “Were you drunk when you wrote this?”. Fingers were not pointed only when things go wrong, but more often when things go right. Fair amount of appreciation was in the air. We were trusted to work for 8 hours, without clock-in clock-out mechanism. It shows that we have the ownership of our products and want to nurture it as best as we can.
One other thing I really love from STOQO’s culture is that we were always in the know of our impact. We had an Angky Office Hour once every two weeks to make sure we knew about what’s going on in the big picture, and how our individual contribution puts a coin into the life of STOQO. I learned that the technology we use to solve problems shouldn’t create a much bigger side problem. That our products need to be purposefully designed and be thoroughly thought of, in order to make a positive impact. My mentor, Mika, also made sure that besides knowing what and how I should code, I know why I have to code it in the first place.
Disclaimer
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to me, and not necessarily to my employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual. The purpose is truly to share with those who are intending to look for an internship. I strongly suggest you take STOQO into consideration, because I’ve had a positive experience at STOQO and would be happy if others can too.
Anyway if you’re upset about GoT’s finale and want to make the world a better place, check out STOQO’s career page or mail your CV to engineering@stoqo.com for full-time and internship opportunities!
The people
I’ve thanked everyone personally, on a sticky note I attached on the farewell Beng-beng wafer. But here is what I want the readers to know; they feel like a second family. They’ve taught me passionately and patiently, they are super appreciative, and warm. When I left at the end of my internship, I can feel that I miss them. Would surely pay STOQO a visit in the future.
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