Thoughts of a Hikingbook intern
Internships are to learn what you never did in a classroom. I am a mobile application development intern at Hikingbook Inc and a second-year computer science undergraduate at the National University of Singapore. Having gone through 3 months of full-time internship here, I have penned down my experience below. Whether you are looking to apply for a position at Hikingbook or interested in software development internships, I hope this article could be of help to you!
What I do
As a mobile application development intern, I mainly help with the development and enhancement of features for our application Hikingbook. At the start of my internship, I was working with user authentication. On the frontend side, adding more sign-in buttons to our app, along with some API calls. Afterwards, I was slowly exposed to more of our app and helped with additional user interface and database migrations. Moving on, I began to implement entirely new features for our app (Referring to our gear management feature!).
How I learned
Throughout the entire internship, I received guidance from Zheng-Xiang (our CEO, senior developer and my supervisor). Before embarking on my tasks, I would receive a rundown and have my questions answered. What I really appreciated about this rundown was that I was always given the reason behind my tasks which really deepened the knowledge I picked up at Hikingbook. For instance, once when we were integrating SwiftUI framework into Swift UIKit, not only was I shown how we are going about it but also the conceptual differences of both frameworks that led to the challenges of integrating them both.
Beside task rundowns, I was also free to ask questions throughout the work process. As a rule of thumb, when I encounter problems, I search around the code base and the internet for possible solutions. Only when nothing comes up or when the problem-solving has taken too long with little progress would I consolidate my findings and approach my supervisor for help. Without fail, I would always receive a detailed explanation for the problem at hand and possible solutions that I could use.
Technical aside, my day-to-day at Hikingbook
As a small start-up of 5, we are all kept updated on each other’s tasks and work progress. At 10: 30am every morning, I attend our standup meeting where we pull up the company’s Kanban board and give updates on the tasks completed the previous day and the current day’s tasks. Then after, I might have a weekly meeting with Zheng-Xiang for a progress review. Following that, I look through my tasks for the day and start breaking them down into sub-tasks with time estimations to keep myself on track. Once done, I start to work on them for the day.
So everyday I code, ask questions, have standup meetings… and then?
I attend more meetings. Something surprising to me about Hikingbook is that despite our small size, we have a great number of meetings. However, I don’t believe this is all bad! As an intern, I think meetings are a great way to learn about things outside of your work scope. In all these meetings I was encouraged to actively participate in them, contributing my ideas and receiving constructive feedback. As someone on the quieter side, these meetings taught me to improve myself as a presenter, even watching others present was a learning opportunity to me.
Soft skills aside, the meetings exposed me to the workings of a startup company. I was able to see statistics that detailed the user usages, see the efforts made to answer customer feedback, and overall how everyone’s work made the company work as a whole. I think this is something I never can experience at school or at the bigger companies and a key takeaway of my internship.
Rumour has it that interning at a start-up is all about the grind.
Yes, interning here was grinding for sure, not chill but worth it. As I worked on each task, I find myself learning and applying new concepts. Many times as the deadlines approach, the stress levels build as I try to learn, solve problems and finish as much as possible especially since my delay may delay others. But when I do complete the tasks, the sense of accomplishment is great. If I really could not do it, I am able to let my supervisor know and my workload will be adjusted to better suit me. Moreover, as mentioned before, I could always ask questions when problems arise.
How’s the team?
The team can make or break anyone’s internship experience and I really enjoyed working with the team at Hikingbook. The work culture here is friendly and flexible. Throughout the day, in our cozy workspace for all 5 of us, spontaneous conversation breaks out from time to time. We also have Slack channels for random chats and news-sharing. As per the name, most of us are hikers (sans me, coming from Singapore with no mountains) and we love the outdoors. Our monthly team building has us travelling to hike, to eat and have a good time together. We also have birthday celebrations, monthly company outings and monthly one-on-one chats.
Challenges
The biggest challenge I faced in my internship was time management. In the beginning, I struggled to understand the large code base and at the same time pick up 2 new programming languages. As such, I was slow to complete my tasks and my Pull Requests (PR) had more mistakes. On the bright side, I was able to overcome this challenge with time and patience. The more I worked with the code base, the faster I am altering it. Also, another thing that really helped me was to start writing notes as I learn. This helped me to research and deepen my understanding of new concepts and it also helped me to retain new information better.
And now the at the end…
Reaching the end of my full-time internship here is a bittersweet moment. I remember starting this journey with an equal mix of trepidation and excitement, unsure of what to expect working in a different country. Now at the end of this journey, I have no regrets, I am heading back with many lessons learned, skills gained, and relationships forged. I really appreciated my experience here and all the people at Hikingbook who made my internship worth it. A huge thank you to you guys!
To end off, to all the job-seeking readers I wish you all the best! And, if you happen to like hiking, love the startup culture, or you are just curious of it, why not give Hikingbook a try?
