A Week In the Life of a Software Engineering Intern
This week was a completely different experience from the previous weeks. Zillow held its Hack Week — which is a time where we work on side projects related to Zillow in some way. These projects could range from a new feature on the website to something ridiculous — like my project. I teamed up with several interns to develop some Slack bots that would take conversation from existing Slack channels at Zillow and have them converse with one another. It was a simple idea but it was hilarious when we got it working.
We started by scraping the conversations in our Slack channels and placing its content in a text file. Then we used another program that applied an algorithm, called a Markov Chain, to generate random sentences based on those we already have in our files. Once completed, these contents would be sent through the Slack API into our project channel. And just to mix things up a bit, I also used Twitter’s API to pull tweets from famously funny users such as Anna Kendrick. We used the Markov chain algorithm once again to send those tweets to the slack channel.
This was a fun project because we generated some weird and funny sentences but I got to work in Python for the first time. Coming from Java, Python was very strange because everything can be done easily, often in one or two lines of code. I definitely prefer Java because Python would make it too easy for me to make mistakes but the simplicity of the language makes coding feel like as if I were writing an essay!
