Tableau, APIs, and Friends: My Blibli Internship
It was my last day of my internship. I had a few things to do that day: send thank you emails, reset my work computer, and, of course, eat one last free chocolate-stuffed pastry from the company pantry. As I power down my computer, I felt a hint of sadness. I was going to miss this place. I asked myself, “why do I miss this place?” I certainly was not going to miss the traffic on the way to work.
Am I going to miss the projects?Processing millions of data points? And then I realized. I was going to miss the people. These past few months, I worked with some of the brightest, kindest, and funnest (I don’t think that’s a word) people I’ve ever met. They were the ones who made this internship an amazing experience.
A little bit about the company and our team.
This past summer, I worked at an Indonesian e-commerce company known as Blibli.com. I was able to work there thanks to the invitation of Johan Sulaiman, the current head of Analytics in Blibli, and to the decision of Fritz Wijaya, the manager of the Analytics team.
Our tech team was small but versatile:
We had Gaby, Ivan, and Harris as the savvy Data Engineers, Ulil the full-stack-grandmaster-engineer, Joshua and Dennis the Data Engineering/platform/every-project-ever interns, Vincent and I as the fresh-from-America Data Science interns, Welly, the Data Wizard, and finally, Barry, the most overworked intern, who did QA/Testing for all of our projects. Our team is led by the fearless Johan Sulaiman and Fritz Wijaya,and supported by Willy our program manager and Ardy the project manager.
We had a very fun, and interesting, team.
The lessons I learned.
In Blibli, I was able to take part in many projects as an intern: creating an automated ETL platform that extracts data from third-party APIs automatically (like Facebook), cleaning 7,000,000 rows of data in Python and visualizing it with Tableau, validating and creating a clean customer master list in SQL, and building a time-series anomaly detection system to prevent fraud transactions. In addition to learning technical skills (thank you Stack Overflow), I learned many important life lessons that will equip me in building my career as a Data Scientist.
If I was to explain all the things that I learned in Blibli, it would take about the same time as watching Die Hard 80,000 times. Instead, I’ve condensed the most important lessons into three points:
1. Collaboration is key.
“Collaboration is the key to success.” This is a phrase that we’ve heard many times from successful tech companies, software engineers, TedTalks, people on the street, etc. In Blibli, I was able to see that phrase transform from an abstract concept to concrete actions.
Blibli has an open-door policy, which means that any employee can talk to anyone, from the marketing team to the CEO himself. This policy created a collaborative culture in Blibli. For example, I saw my team working with the Digital Marketing team in Bangalore on a Customer Churn prediction project. I saw my mentor, Johan, proactively reaching out to the marketing department to get their expert feedback on an ongoing Social Media Analytics project.
In my own projects, my success was due to the input and feedback of my co-workers. Every time I was stuck on a problem, my co-workers would gladly assist me (when they’re not very busy, of course) and answer my questions. Without this culture of collaboration, my projects could not have been where they are now.
2. Results, Results, Results.
The first week I was at work, my mentor gave me valuable advice: “Tim, every day, you need to produce results.” As a student, my job was to learn and understand theory, models, and technologies. However, in Blibli, I learned that in order for a company to thrive, I must start learning how to transform what I know into solutions to real business problems and communicate that effectively. I had to be results-oriented and user-oriented.
This change of mindset was and is still difficult for me. In school, I was used to take the role of a researcher, focusing my efforts on perfecting my model, making sure every step is perfect, and finding the best, most cutting-edge way to answer a question. However, in the industry like Blibli, I had to provide a solution in 1–2 weeks with limited resources! Furthermore, I found that my perfect, cutting-edge solution often is not what the user/client wants.
My experience in Blibli taught me to build solutions from the bottom-up. First, create a simple, relevant, and effective solution, then build complexity from there. Work with your users and managers. Make sure your goals are aligned. Strive to create a working solution, not a perfect one. In Blibli, I had to learn to prioritize efficiency over novelty.
3. Learning Doesn’t Stop at Graduation.
Tableau, Google Cloud, Python, Docker. These are only the few technologies that I learned over the summer. Every single day, I had to learn something new.
Being in school, I can have a week to learn a new topic. For example, let’s say that I’m learning about Decision Trees. That week, I can read books about the theory behind the model, understand the different algorithms that implement the model, and implement the most efficient algorithm to a homework problem I have.
In Blibli, I had to learn all of this in one day. There was no time! In order for the company to improve, its employees had to quickly move from learning new technology to implementing that technology. At Blibli, I became trained to learn efficiently.
In conclusion, I had an amazing time at Blibli! I was placed in a great team and learned so much from them. Blibli is a great company thanks to the hard-working and collaborative people in it. I hope that I will cross paths with Blibli sometime in the future, and I encourage those of you who are considering to work in Blibli to take the leap! In Blibli, you’ll find great technology, and, most importantly, great people.
