Adam Faulkner on moving forward
A rising senior at University of Texas at Austin, Adam Faulkner shares his Dropbox internship experience
Adam Faulkner is a returning Dropbox intern and a rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin. His work on full-text search debuted already this summer. Here he shares what he learned, from one summer to the next, about keeping a project on track.
How did you first get into engineering?
I first really got into it when I was about thirteen years old. I was playing a game called Civilization IV, and there was some way to modify aspects of the game by programming. I taught myself Python so that I could do that.
A year after that, one of my parents’ friends needed some web programming done, so I taught myself some of that using Python. That led to another job working for one of my parents’ friends during high school, which led me to major in computer science at UT.
This is your second time interning at Dropbox. How did you decide to come back for another round?
There were a whole lot of factors that played into it. One of the huge factors was that I had a really awesome mentor last summer, so I knew that Dropbox valued giving interns awesome mentors. I also had a really interesting project last summer.
What did you work on last summer?
Ziga Mahkovec was my mentor, and I worked on a document previews pipeline. The code I worked on last summer we’re not actually using anymore, which is good, because there was a lot of learning that happened when I wrote it. But the current system we’re using evolved out of what I wrote.
And what have you been working on this summer?
This summer, I’ve been working on full-text search with Samir Goel on the infrastructure team. It’s a feature we just announced at our press event in London.
The specifics to what I’m working on is that as you type in the search box, it shows you file name search matches. We needed it to be really fast. The bulk of my project was building this on top of our new search infrastructure, so that we could perform search queries as quickly as possible and give people feedback as they type.
Why did you want to work on infrastructure?
The classes I’ve liked the most at UT have been distributed systems and operating systems. Distributed systems, in particular, is somewhat relevant to infrastructure.
Another reason was that the work I did at a previous internship at Facebook, as well as a small amount of the work I did last year, was very frontend, user-facing work. I wanted to try something different.
You were able to ship a feature very quickly. How did you and the team you worked with make that happen?
The team I was working with has been working on this since last November, and they’ve really been focused on it since March. As far as making it happen, I think a whole lot of it was that I worked with some really smart people who’d done a lot of similar stuff before.
For me, I’d say one of the big differences between this summer and last summer is that whenever I got stuck on something, I asked for help more. That definitely helped me keep things moving forward.
What did you learn this summer?
Initially I didn’t really speak up very much in meetings. I sort of kept a mental list of things to ask right after the meeting, which kind of defeats the purpose of the meeting. So one of the things I learned was how to interact with people in meetings.
What was your greatest challenge this summer?
My mentor really wanted to make sure I was interacting with people, especially outside of my team. He had me schedule lunches with a different person every day. Initially it was really intimidating to do that.
Do you have any advice for getting the most out of a summer internship?
Meet lots of people, interact with people. Overcommunicate.
Since I had lunch with all of these different people, at my mentor’s urging, it became a lot easier for me to ask for help or just talk to them about what they were working on. They’d give me feedback and ideas, and it was really helpful. It’s also a lot more fun that way.
What other problems would you really like to solve with code?
If I could solve any problem, I’d cure Alzheimer’s. But as for technical problems, I’d like to learn more about mobile development and understand why it’s such a complex problem.
You’re heading back to campus in the fall for your last semester. What are you most looking forward to?
San Francisco is great, but they don’t really have barbecue here. I’m looking forward to seeing people again and getting barbecue.
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