My Internship at Floored (now CBRE Build)
Today marks the final day of my 10 weeks as a Software Engineering intern here at Floored. Tomorrow I will be heading back to Princeton for my senior year of studying Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and although I’m very excited to go back to school, I do already miss this place. Floored is a wonderful company to work at, that allowed me to learn, ask questions and get answers, and meet a great amount of amazing people.
The slides for my presentation live here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSifx5WH8NVFlPlQ0kSe3QVEnVzta-NbvHD8t5DaBPY2XQeVu5wizNTlFqNKkbskNbnv_BLdPi1K-r0/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000
A few days ago I got to give a final presentation to the team, summarizing my experiences here over the whole course of my internship — the embedded slide deck you can see were the visuals for that. Since some of those slides might not make sense without the accompanying verbals, here a few quick comments:
First and foremost, I came to Floored to grow as a programmer. At the same time, though, I wanted to learn as much about Floored as a company as I possibly could — in my opinion, it’s a great start up with an even greater company culture, and I wanted to understand how Floored got to be what it is.
The collection of my github branches probably most closely tracks all the features I got to work on during my time here. I won’t go into details about what functionality each of those branches introduced, but looking back was a fun exercise, seeing how I grew more comfortable with the code base over time and the different sides of the project I got to explore and contribute to. Looking at my overall “lines added” to “lines deleted” ratio, I got a bit flustered until a coworker of mine explained that deleting more code than adding is actually pretty good, since it means that you cleaned up the codebase a bunch.
One of my goals had been to gain as many new hard skills as possible, so my team let me work on different parts of the project that would allow me to explore different tools, languages or concepts I hadn’t really been comfortable with before.
Over my time here, I asked the same two questions to most of the engineers working at Floored: “In your opinion, what makes a good programmer?” and “How do you become such a person?” No two people gave me the same answer, but I kept track of all responses and related them to what I learned during my time here. Interning at Floored allowed me to grow as a programmer in many ways, but also showed me many more ways in which I still want to and need to improve lots — a journey I’m excited about continuing even after my time here is over.
To understand Floored as a company, I made a point of talking to every single person in the office, trying to understand each and everyone’s role, the path that got them here and their take on Floored. People here are amazing, and I’m hugely thankful for the many conversations people were willing to have with me, changing my opinions on entrepreneurship, career goals and the StartUp life.
Although I was a Software Engineering intern, the sales team let me sit in on a few of their sales calls, so I could understand that side of the business better as well. I loved getting to watch them — there is some form of art in delivering a good sales call, an art that I felt like I could learn a lot from. A good salesperson is able to convey their genuine excitement about the product, while at the same time not letting their enthusiasm become too overwhelming for the customer. This “contained enthusiasm” was a great lesson for me to learn — I personally tend to explode with excitement, sometimes a little too much so, and I’m working on getting better about conveying my energy without having it be too overwhelming.
Many things happened outside of the office: I got to join Floored’s summer company retreat, a Hackathon, watch my coworkers speak on panels, sit in on a few job interviews, hang out with wonderful people and do a bunch of other things during my time here. So all in all, I absolutely fulfilled the goals that I had set out for myself at the beginning of the summer.
Floored allowed me to learn a lot from them, and in return I summarized a few of the themes, ideas and areas I had come across during my time here in which I thought Floored could continue to grow. With most things, however, I felt like the amazing team I got to work with wasn’t even fully aware of how wonderful of a place they’ve created for me to intern in: an incredibly welcoming team always willing to answer questions, and an open, fun work atmosphere with genuine excitement about the work that was being done — I’ll definitely miss this place a lot.
Originally published on August 31, 2015.
