My internship with Bungalow
Hi I am Dora, a Computer Engineering Student at the University of Waterloo. I am in the co-op program and recently had the opportunity to spend 4 months working at Bungalow. I wanted to share my experiences working at Bungalow, my expectations, what I have learned, and what things surprised me. If you are a student also looking for a co-op work term, or an employer looking to hire a co-op student, I hope you find my experience interesting or helpful!
Interview
It can be pretty nerve-racking entering a job interview as an undergraduate, but Bungalow’s process helped put me at ease and get an immediate feel for the company culture. I was particularly excited with the technical aspects of the interview as Bungalow allowed me to choose from sets of questions, giving me the opportunity to better showcase my abilities. I was impressed to learn Bungalow provided mentorship programs and time for personal projects so that interns could grow as software developers. This nurturing environment and emphasis on maintaining a good work-life balance stood out to me, and it was exciting to meet the entire team over lunch. The downtown view was a highlight of the office tour and the snack selection didn’t hurt my choice to accept the job offer. Needless to say, I was sold on Bungalow.
First couple of days
I was nervous on my first day with Bungalow but happy to start my official position as a software engineering intern. After being shown to my desk, I was greeted with an awesome welcome kit which included a custom-made lego mini figure with my name on it, as well as some cool swag like the infusion water bottle.
Bungalow set me up with an experienced full-stack software engineer, Beth, who would be my mentor, teaching me software development best practices and monitoring my progress through weekly one-on-ones. Debugging can be frustrating for any new intern, but Beth made sure I had the right tools and mindset to tackle any of my challenges. It was valuable to be mentored by an experienced developer, and Bungalow even allowed me to develop my abilities with their technologies Django and Vue independently. Instead of jumping into tickets on day one, I was encouraged to work on a side project of my choice that used Vue and Django for user-based applications.
Side Project
Learning the front-end with Vue and the back-end with Django not only prepared me for my later work with Bungalow but afforded me practice with the type of user and data-centered design Bungalow excels in. It was exciting to set my own schedule and tackle the new languages at my own pace, while simultaneously expanding my resume with a project that resonated with me. I’ve always enjoyed jumping down the rabbit hole of random Quora topics, and I had fun personalizing my project by exploring Vue and Django through the design of a minimalist Quora.
I focused on features integral to any question-and-answer platform, such as the ability for users to ask and answer questions as well as comment and vote. I created customizable user-feeds and was proud of the personalized topic-selection features that I had developed. This project was a great practical introduction to the two technologies, and I had fun cutting my teeth with hello world applications for the first few days. By the end of the project, I felt much more familiar with the technologies, and I was ready to jump into the code base to get my feet wet.
Getting into the Meat of the Work Term
The learning curve was steep, but Bungalow provided me with the necessary resources to move from smaller tickets to more difficult tasks. Due to the supportive environment, I was able to manage my work without feeling overwhelmed or pressured for time. The entire time I was working on tasks, I felt reassured by my mentor and coworkers, which allowed me to perform at my best and grow as an engineer. When I joined Bungalow, I learned that the team was working on replacing a third party app with their own application flow for incoming residents.
As a co-op, I had the opportunity to contribute to this high impact work by creating a feature that notifies the team immediately when a resident submits their application. To optimize tasks for the customer facing team, I also created an internal tool that allows them to set up a meet and greet for the incoming resident and the current occupants by automating the sending of custom email and sms notifications. To improve the efficiency and reliability of these notifications, I performed code refactoring on them. I also helped the visibility and record-keeping of customer-facing teams by adding cc and bcc functionalities to the notifications. For every backend task, I also wrote a corresponding unit test, which improved the quality and testability of the code.
The order of execution for Bungalow’s deployment pipeline ran risks of server downtime if the migration ran before the codeswap. I ran into problems when deleting a field in the database so I altered the field’s property to allow it to be null and then updated the guidelines, resolving server problems and warning any future engineers who may be doing similar work in the future.
I also contributed to Bungalow’s frontend by refactoring the testimonial block on Bungalow’s website to use Vuetify rather than Vue Bootstrap, making the component reusable and fully adjustable to different screen sizes using CSS grid.
I appreciate Bungalow’s effort to create a fun and nurturing learning environment for their employees, and I particularly enjoyed social events like canoeing on the grand river, and the house-warming party organized by the head of engineering. I thoroughly enjoyed the team building exercises organized by Terminal, especially the frisbee game, where I taught a fellow teammate how to perform the difficult underhand throw.
