My Engineering Internship Experience at Boclips
As a computer science student from Munich, I was looking for a 3-month internship opportunity in the UK to dive into a real coding world instead of studying its theory.
I had the chance to work as a software engineer intern with the ed-tech startup Boclips in London.
The Interview Process and Onboarding
Inspired by a blog post about UK startups that mentioned Boclips, I sent my application. Shortly after that I had my first call with the Head of Recruiting scheduled. During the call, I had the feeling of having a natural conversation rather than being observed in a stressful job interview like I had experienced before.
I had further interviews with two engineers and the UX designer, which included a small coding exercise.
I value the fact that I got to know and introduce myself to to many people before hiring. I felt on one side, this allowed me to get enough insights about the business and potential co-workers to make my decision. On the other side, the company got a bigger picture of me and different first-hand opinions on whether I represent a good fit.
After all, I had a strong positive feeling about Boclips and was so excited to join them!
On my first day, I joined the team lunch and had a warm welcome from everybody. Overall I felt that everyone was expecting me, be it because I already had a story prepared for me to work on or be it because my engineering colleagues were guiding me through the infrastructure of the projects as well as explaining to me the main concepts and processes.
During my internship, 1:1 meetings with my colleague provided a possibility to give feedback and to find things to work on or to improve myself. This way, I could set goals like following TDD more or reflect on what projects I would like to explore in detail.
Programming in a Modern World
A highly valuable piece of knowledge I will take with me is the engineering methodologies used. With the company following agile development, especially extreme programming which was new to me. In the engineering team we pair programmed on a daily basis. This brings transparency and great communication to the team and supports finding different solutions for a problem. Swapping the pairs once or twice a day lets you keep track of all streams of work and gives you a bigger picture.
Another aspect I got used to is TDD. Thinking about the requirements of a new feature and writing a test for them before implementing functionality was unusual for me at first, but paid off in many ways.
For me it was a privilege to work with so many modern technologies (fully automated application deployment) and programming languages like React, Kotlin or Scala, to mention a few.
Our workflow was very smooth interacting with UX design and product management. Thanks to retrospective meetings, daily stand ups and feedback sessions the communication was always held up high.
Being stylish as an engineer — elaborate coding
Coming from university, neither code style nor package structuring has ever been a major issue to me. Often writing a programme meant starting to write code as soon as possible to deliver in time. Working at Boclips, I learnt that coding is so much more than that. Coding is not about showing off hacky skills, it is about making sure that your lines are understandable and clear without further context to whoever reads or works on it later on. I started to think longer about naming, nesting and the whole implementation beforehand. I cherished refactoring the code and thinking constantly about simplifying lines.
A part of the BoTeam
One of the prioritised aspects at Boclips is preserving the company culture. Waking up every day I felt happy to walk into an office with people that care for each other. Going to the gym together, bringing the day to a close at the pub every now and then or having lunch as a group (where I would often end up crying with laughter) makes you bond with your colleagues in no time. Coming from Germany, I also enjoyed how international the team is. Collaborating with people from all over the world drops cultural boundaries and results in an open-minded team that loves to share their backgrounds.
Broadening my horizon
Looking back at the 3 months, I can distinguish a rising learning curve. In my first weeks, I worked mainly on one project, still becoming familiar with new programming languages and the infrastructure. Step by step, I adapted to refactoring more and testing elaborately in advance. Later on, I encountered other parts of the application up to the point where I felt familiar with every project. From working mostly on frontend, I moved on to creating endpoints for a service, configuring pipelines, writing end-to-end tests, machine learning and more. I also realised I work in a much more structured way now than when I joined. I am profoundly glad I could get my hands on such a variety of tasks and learnt more than I could have hoped for during my time there.
All in all, I am incredibly thankful I was given the chance to do an internship at Boclips. I met so many inspiring and friendly people and I could grow as an engineer as well as on a personal level. I’m looking forward to visiting the company again and can definitely imagine working at Boclips again after my studies.
Originally published at medium.com on February 21, 2019.
