DAZN Internship
My 4 month internship at DAZN
Overall, my experience at DAZN is one I’ll never forget. I learned so much, met amazing people who I’m going to miss and was able to properly experience the working world for the first time in my life.
Hello, I am a Computer Science student at Imperial College London going into 4th year. I just completed a 4 month summer internship at DAZN as a junior software engineer and am writing about my incredible experience working with team six: the team in charge of the page manager tool.
Getting started
As someone who enjoys sleeping in, waking up at 9am to meet a whole new team of people and work in a whole new environment was quite nerve-racking. After dragging myself out of bed and a few energy drinks, I was kindly greeted by my supervisor Lee and the rest of team six shortly after. I’m very happy to say that these were some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met.
Lee helped me install and setup the environments needed to start working, and everyone was very helpful in teaching me the ropes and answering my questions. In the past during my uni projects, I’d been hesitant to ask questions among team members because I thought it would come off more annoying, and I would instead spend hours digging through stack overflow. However, everyone in team six greatly encouraged me to ask for help and was extremely supportive in guiding me to overcome problems, which I am very grateful for.
This was my first time working in a professional environment and I was expecting it to be much more serious and formal. However, to my surprise, everything felt very informal and light-hearted, but everyone was still very passionate about what they did, making for a great team atmosphere that I quickly become comfortable working in.
Tickets
For the first half of my internship, I would complete tickets that were reported on a tool called Jira. From ticket work, I was able to practise and become stronger at coding in JavaScript and CSS, and the team was very eager to teach me new technologies, such as Cypress and Node.js. Furthermore, I was introduced to GitHub features such as GitHub actions and pull requests. I would make mistakes, such as merging to main without permission, but after being told off, I made sure not to repeat these mistakes, otherwise I would face my engineering manager Brett’s wrath.
A great experience for me was working in a professional agile software development team. We had standup meetings every morning so everyone was up to track on what everyone’s up to. We also worked very closely with our clients and designer, so there was a constant clear vision for our software. We even had retro meetings where we would discuss the positives and negatives about how we worked, ensuring everyone could get their thoughts across and making the work environment as comfortable for everyone as possible. I was rather amazed at how well the team worked together and will try to apply some of these aspects to my future group projects at uni.
The only thing I found frustrating was Cypress tests randomly breaking with weird error messages, and having to wait hours and sometimes days to get code merged into main.
“You’re in charge of the most important project of the year”
About a month into my time at DAZN, I thought to myself that I wanted to get as much out of my internship as possible, so I asked if there were any major features or projects I could work on. I was then told I could lead the stats engine project, which I was later told it was possibly the most important project of the year. The project involved importing engagement data into page manager, and displaying the data in the form of a heatmap for the editors to see. This seemed incredibly daunting at first as I had no idea where to start, but after being given some direction from Brett, I felt much more comfortable having a crack at the project.
Initially, the project started out quite dull and slow, as Lee and I would spend a few weeks carrying out interviews with editors to understand what they wanted, and with the data team to find out what data was available to us and how to get it. However, after we had our requirements and knew what was possible, the project started to pick up the pace and I was able to start coding to prove that it was possible to get this data into page manager. After a week or two, I was able to display data in the front end, and although it made the site look completely horrendous, it was great to have all the foundations in place that we could later build up and improve.
The last month of my internship was spent better designing how the data was presented, productionising the spaghetti code and writing tests to ensure everything was robust. At the end of my internship, I was very happy to be able to look back and see that I had done a major piece of work and made a contribution to this team.
Final thoughts
Overall, my experience at DAZN is one I’ll never forget. I learned so much, met amazing people who I’m going to miss and was able to properly experience the working world for the first time in my life. It was an incredible opportunity that I would highly recommend to anyone pursuing a career in Computer Science.
