Spring Internship 2019

The program

This is a second In­tern­ship Pro­gram at Dwarves Found­a­tion. Held in Spring of 2019, we hand­picked every single can­did­ate that passed our CCAT test. Chan­ging our meas­ure­ment met­rics from the last pro­gram, we aim to se­lect the can­did­ates not just with strong back­ground, bi­lin­gual, and also we feel that they are un­con­ven­tional.

Over 160 can­did­ates, we only se­lec­ted 12. They are di­vided into three groups, each group with people from backend, mo­bile, and web. Golang is still the primary lan­guage that they have to learn and prac­tice in the first month. Golang is a handy but straight­for­ward lan­guage to get people on the same cod­ing page. With Golang, they can quickly pick up the lan­guage and then focus on the prob­lem set they need to solve.

After the first month, they went back to their ca­reer choice. If they want to do web, at this point, they will know a whole web front and the backend. If they’re going to do mo­bile de­vel­op­ment, they will see how the backend works, not just their view com­pon­ents. For the backend guy, we will con­tinue to teach them a bit of how the de­ploy­ment works. The main point is still to get them the whole pic­ture of the sys­tem they going to build.

Learn­ing from the last pro­gram, this year, we tried to add in the miss­ing pieces of soft­ware de­vel­op­ment know­ledge that they haven’t been taught in school or open-source pro­jects. To dis­tin­guish Coder, Pro­gram­mer, and Soft­ware En­gin­eer, they need to learn the dif­fer­ence. The train­ing pro­gram in­cludes a glance over

• Software Engineering Introduction
• Software Modelling
• Software Architecture
• Software Construction
• Software Process
• Software Quality

Its goal

The pro­gram was de­signed to bring hands-on ex­per­i­ence to the can­did­ates. Ap­ply­ing Pair Pro­gram­ming prac­tice, we as­sign each group to a spe­cific mentor. They had their time learned from the ment­ors on the de­vel­op­ing products.

• A DevOps web app wrapping over Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS to provide a single interface, manage an entire lifecycle of an application.
• A system that aggregates schedule from all the sports events and deeply integrates to your calendar.

Ex­per­i­ence all the best prac­tices from code­base struc­ture; mul­tiple en­vir­on­ments from de­vel­op­ment, test­ing, sta­ging, and pro­duc­tion; git­flow with pull re­quest and code re­view, mi­croservices ar­chi­tec­ture, etc. All the cut­ting edge tech­no­lo­gies from k8s, AWS de­ploy­ment, react-redux, Net­lify, Cloud­flare …

Highlights

The metrics

• Strong background
• Bilingual
• Unconventional
• Growth potential

We say yes to stu­dents with a strong found­a­tion, growth po­ten­tial, and good Eng­lish. The stu­dent with a strong found­a­tion has a step for­ward com­pared to other stu­dents. They can pick up thing very quick and ready for the real pro­ject. The can­did­ates with a right at­ti­tude to­ward pro­fes­sional will win the po­s­i­tion.

Average age

The best year to apply for an in­tern­ship at Dwarves Found­a­tion? We think the senior stu­dents are the most suit­able for the in­tern­ship pro­gram. We are likely pick­ing 80% of senior stu­dents than 3rd year and 2nd year. The senior stu­dents will have more chance to focus on full­time job after their gradu­ation.

Diversity

There are more fe­male can­did­ates this year. We love to in­crease gender di­versity in the team to bring per­spect­ives. Des­pite the fact that fe­male staff still have dis­ad­vant­ages to win the lead­er­ship po­s­i­tion due to stress and heavy work­load.

Culture

The in­terns love our cul­ture. Hav­ing a healthy team cul­ture provides a good en­vir­on­ment for self-de­vel­op­ing. It feels like they are already a part of the team.

Time

Three months are still too short for them to ab­sorb the pro­gram. The first month is for fun­da­mental catch­ing up. The next two months are for hands-on ex­per­i­ence.

Next program

Des­pite the fact that all the met­rics are es­sen­tial, we feel that dur­ing the first days of their ca­reers, the at­ti­tude is the most im­port­ant char­ac­ter­istic. The next batch should be more on at­ti­tude over skill. 80% of in­terns with good at­ti­tude tend to be hard­work­ing

University

Can­did­ates from top uni­versit­ies like the Uni­versity of Sci­ence or the Uni­versity of Tech­no­logy have a stronger back­ground than oth­ers. But at the same time, they are not bi­lin­gual, which af­fect their con­fid­ence in work­ing in mul­tiple cul­ture en­vir­on­ment. Top can­did­ates learned Eng­lish by them­selves.

Technology

80% of can­did­ates want to learn tech­no­lo­gies over found­a­tion know­ledge. Most of them can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between soft­ware ser­vice firm and product com­pany. Trendy tech­no­lo­gies like block­chain and AI still catch their eyes.