First Steps into Software Engineering — Internship Journey at Jublia

Reflections by Daniel Qiao and Nicholas Tan

Every Summer, Jublia welcomes Tech Interns and this year we had 2 students, Daniel and Nicholas, from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Throughout their 4-months internship programme, they were able to gain valuable industry experience, as well as having the opportunity to work with major international clients in the Events Technology sector. This was a vital component to their undergraduate degree, as it was their first ever official internship. We will be sharing some insights into their Internship experience with Jublia.

Daniel:

I am blessed to have the opportunity to embark on a fruitful learning journey over the course of my first internship at Jublia. The Tech Team and the entire company as a whole were extremely friendly and harmonious, so as an intern I felt trusted and valued in this young and growing team.

I interned at the Tech Ops Team of Technology & Product department in Jublia, where we are responsible for the backend development of Jublia Sense, the communication channels, the data-synchronization across our platforms, as well as the API Integrations sync for live events.

Tech Ops contributes to Jublia’s platforms as a supporting pillar, as most of our functions work to build a scalable base to perform intelligent business matching, video meetings, etc. As such, both reliability and agility are of crucial importance for our team.

Jublia has a typical startup culture in the regard of development in my experience: move fast but don’t break things. One of the main reasons that I chose to join Jublia was due to the fact that I saw an opportunity for growth in this fast-paced environment and I am very thankful to have gone through a meaningful development journey here. As shown by my commit graph below, I have been coding every single day of my Internship, which is truly something I will cherish forever.

It has been a very fruitful journey at Jublia. I managed to implement several features on a product which has millions of users, this is a valuable experience that I will not be able to get from my coursework in school.

Nicholas:

Jublia was my first official internship during university and I was assigned to the Business Matching Team as a Backend Software Engineer Intern. I am thankful to be able to have my internship during the COVID-19 situation and glad to be able to have useful takeaways from my time at the company.

During my time in Jublia, I had a glimpse into the software engineering life where we had weekly scrum video meetings at the start and end of week where we would update each other on the tasks we were handling as tasks might be interrelated and could affect each other’s releases.

While previously back in school I had learnt Python programming, it was insufficient as it was mainly theoretical and within the industry there was a lot more to be taken note of, such as writing code according to production standards, workflow processes when we are releasing new code into the current repository, etc. All these seemed unfamiliar to me initially and there were some difficulties. However, I am glad to have friendly and helpful colleagues, and especially thankful towards my team leads for helping me to answer some queries I had along the way and ease my integration into the software engineering life.

Jublia certainly helped me gain an edge with software engineering skills as I seek to pursue a career in data science in the future which complements it. I will not forget the open and close knitted culture I experienced with my colleagues. Thank you Jublia!