DAZN Code First Girls Interns: One Year Later
In 2021, DAZN sponsored six students to take part in the Code First Girls Degree (formerly known as the Nanodegree). Each student was given a mentor from the DAZN engineering team and benefitted from one-on-one support throughout the course.
At the end of the programme, Julie and Abi were offered paid positions on a one year placement (internship) in which they would rotate between various teams within DAZN engineering:
- Developer Experience (DX)
- Backend Content Discovery (Atlantis)
- Frontend Sports Data (Capybaras)
- UX and Design
In joining each team for three months, they would experience what it’s like to be a full-time, full-stack developer, by picking up tickets and working with popular technologies such as TypeScript, React, Node, and AWS. With support from each team, they would get a chance to improve their coding and learn valuable skills such as debugging, testing, API management, deployment, design and much, much more! 😎
Julie and Abi have now completed their internships, and have been reflecting on their time at DAZN. Here they share with us what it’s been like working as Junior Software Engineers, their takeaways on this new career path, what’s next for them both and some photos of their time with the various teams! 🚀
What was your favourite part of the internship?
Julie: Everything about this internship was fantastic. I had exposure to a wide variety of engineering that I don’t think I could have gotten if I joined as a Software Engineer in one team. I’m so happy my decision to change careers was the right one and incredibly grateful to DAZN and all the people who supported me on this opportunity! 💜
It was fantastic exploring backend as I haven’t had much exposure to the area, other than one lesson on API on the Nanodegree, so I was dreading going into the Backend team! But at the end of the 3 months rotation, pretty pleased to say I managed to build an internal CLI tool for the team!
I would say my favourite part of the internship was working on the front-end features. I loved seeing ideas and designs come to life visually and I definitely found it a lot easier when it came to debugging any issues. I also found myself enjoying the UX rotation and surprisingly found myself to have some creative ideas! 💡 I found it incredibly insightful to understand the thinking behind UX and Design when it came to designing new features and it really isn’t just making things look pretty.
Abi: Having had this as my first professional experience as a developer, I feel like I’m walking away with more exposure to the development cycle than some engineers will get in an entire career! I loved being able to try my hand at a range of things from DevOps to design. I got to work on tickets ranging from small bug fixes in production to a full POC for a new feature. My favourite project was getting to independently build a full-stack web app from scratch for an internal tool that is still being used by one of the teams!
I now have a really good idea of the areas I’m most comfortable in, what I’m most interested in learning more about, and the ways of working that suit me best. Maybe most importantly, I can now confidently say that I made the right decision when I took the leap to change my career!
What was your biggest technical challenge?
Julie: Besides finding testing challenging (though I loved using Cypress for front-end testing and have a love/hate relationship with Jest 😆).
One of the biggest challenge for me was all the context switching between different code bases/repo. I experienced this the most in my 3rd rotation with the Frontend Sports Data team, as they manage a lot of different frontend features.
Having spent the last 2 rotations working on one single project, I did struggle having to understand what the feature does, how that looked on the frontend and also the code that was written by other engineers. It was definitely a great learning curve and helped to boost my confidence when I understood the logic to the code that was written.
Abi: When I first learned to code, I was told that it is as much of an art as it is a science. I’ve found that to be especially true when it comes to testing. While the goals of automated testing are fairly straightforward, there are lots of different ways to achieve them and I really underestimated how varied the implementation could be! Each team had its own approach to testing that was determined by the tools and frameworks they use to build their services, as well as the personal preferences of each team member. Just when I thought I had gotten the hang of one technique, I had to figure out a new one!
That said, it definitely got easier towards the end, although I still found myself discovering new tools and methods in my final rotation. It was really valuable to see the variety of approaches a modern, complex service like DAZN employs to maintain reliability, and one day I’m sure mocking an AWS service won’t fill me with dread. 😝
What advice would you give to early-career software engineers?
Julie:
- Google and Stackoverflow truly are your best friends! It’s perfectly fine to google things, everyone does it, so don’t think you are a fraud for doing it. I for one always need a reminder on flexbox!
- It is okay to not know everything or not get something technical straight away. No learning path is linear, the more you code, the more bugs you fix, the more confident you will be overtime.
- Comparison is the thief of joy — we all try not to do it but we still do. It is hard not to compare yourself to other junior software engineers and wonder why you’re not grasping the concepts as quickly as them or why you can’t code as quickly as them. But remember the only person you should compare is yourself, where you were yesterday to where you are today!
- Being in a great and supportive team makes ALL the difference to your learning and career experience. Knowing that you can ask your team anything and they are there for you, to pair program with you, and help you figure out issues which can make any daunting tasks much more achievable.
Abi:
- Find a mentor — when you’re starting a new career or position, you’ll have so many questions and things to learn, but you don’t have to try to figure everything out on your own. When you’re feeling unsure of yourself or just need a friendly face, it makes a huge difference knowing there’s at least one person in your corner!
- Stay curious — while you may be prioritising getting a strong foundation early in your career, try taking a T-Shaped Learning approach. Keep an eye out for interesting courses, blogs or podcasts and if you have a budget, attend conferences to expose yourself to different areas and ideas. Having a broad understanding of things outside your speciality will allow you to have informed conversations with more people and make you a stronger, more confident developer overall.
- Communication is key — contrary to stereotype, coding is an incredibly collaborative job and being able to explain your code can be just as important as being able to write it! From pairing sessions and sprint reviews to blogs and documentation, learning how to be an effective and confident communicator will make your job a lot easier.
So what’s next?
Julie: After completing the internship, I have now joined SRE as a Junior Software Engineer! I’m three weeks in and I’m enjoying learning all things SRE, along with getting to know my supportive and helpful team! I’m excited to learn this part of engineering that I haven’t experienced, though I’m secretly hoping my experience learning to code in Golang will turn out to be ok! 😅
Abi: After rejoining the Backend Content Discovery team as a full-time developer, I got an opportunity to work in my dream industry. I’ll be leaving DAZN to start a role as a Full-Stack Software Engineer at a behavioural science company in London.
I’m incredibly proud to have started my career at DAZN and have immense gratitude for the unique opportunity the team so thoughtfully put together. A huge thank you to all the incredible people who supported me throughout the last year. 🥰
