Core Engineering Internship at Meetup: #TheReview by Ladies Storm Hackathons

I’m a member of the Ladies Storm Hackathons community on Facebook and Amy Chen recently suggested “The Review”, a contributor series where women blog about their engineering internship experience to advocate for companies that are great places to work. The last thing we want is for women to leave engineering because they didn’t find a company that was the right fit for them, so I think this is a great idea. I was a Core Engineering intern at Meetup this summer and I’d definitely recommend this internship to a female friend. In this blog post, I’ll share some details about my experience.

The Organization

A claymation video is worth a thousand words!

Since 2002, Meetup’s mission has been to help people “Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything”. Meetup’s web and mobile apps enable people with similar goals and interests to meet up face-to-face in self-organized Meetups. Through the app, people create Meetup groups around a shared interest (such as a career change, hobby, or lifestyle). Others using the app can then join these Meetup groups to “find the others” who share that interest. These Meetup groups schedule IRL Meetups where the members can make connections and create change offline.

Meetup plays a huge role in my path to software engineering. I hadn’t studied computer science as an undergraduate. Before I went back to school for a Masters degree in computer science, I picked up programming from online tutorials. Then, I searched Meetup for groups for female Python developers and found PyLadies. The PyLadies Meetup community helped me keep up momentum with coding before I enrolled in graduate school; it would’ve been much harder to build my skills and confidence without their support.

There are tons of Meetup groups that are great resources for women in engineering, including Women Who Code, League of Women Coders, Girl Develop It and PyLadies. I linked to the NYC chapters but most of these groups have chapters in other locations.

What I worked on

In most cases, Meetup engineers are distributed among cross-functional product teams. Each product team owns one aspect of the product, such as Member Growth or Organizer Retention. Interns were integrated into the product teams, participating in daily team standups, sprint planning/retrospectives, and all other team meetings.

This summer, I was part of the Member Engagement team. As the name suggests, Member Engagement’s goal is to keep members on the platform engaged. Metrics of engagement include joining new Meetup groups and RSVPs to Meetups.

In the first 6–8 weeks, I fixed bugs and refactored code primarily in the Switchboard codebase. Switchboard is Meetup’s system for sending email, onsite and push notifications. Then, I was asked to take ownership of one of the projects in the team’s pipeline. The project hasn’t launched yet so I won’t go into details, but it’s a Twilio integration and the main technical challenge was devising (and implementing) a way to meet the latency requirement for messages we send to users, taking into account the typical volume of requests Meetup’s web app receives and the constraint of Twilio’s throughput.

The technologies I worked with were Scala, Java, MySQL, and Redis. All code I wrote was, or will be, launched in production.

Member Engagement team trying to take a group photo at the summer picnic

Engineering across the organization

There are ~50 engineers at Meetup and plenty of opportunities to learn about what other teams are working on. Some of the other teams for engineers at Meetup include:

• Organizer Growth
• Member Growth
• Meetup Pro
• International
• Organizer Retention
• Mobile Apps
• Data
• Web Platform
• Automation & Infrastructure
• Internal Tools

On Mondays, engineers across all teams share updates about what launched the previous week and what’s in progress. If someone from another team mentioned a feature that sounded interesting or a bug that they encountered, I asked them some questions to learn more. Everyone I approached was happy to chat about features or bugs specific to their team.

Jake Levine, the Core Engineering Manager who managed all the interns, encouraged us to sit in on other teams’ sprint retros / planning. I asked the engineering lead of the Organizer Retention team if I could observe their sprint retro and she was very welcoming.

Meetup also maintains a JIRA board where everyone is encouraged to add product health improvement ideas. Product health improvements could be related to:

• Performance related issues you have experienced (both as a developer and a user of Meetup)
• Testing improvement ideas
• Build / Deployment improvements
• Monitoring / Logging improvements

All engineers are invited to a monthly meeting where we prioritize these product health improvement ideas.

Company Values

Meetup’s company values include:

• Maximum Impact on Users
• Debate & Decide
• Change the Company
• Futurize

The interns seized opportunities to “Change the Company” this summer. Rishabh Jain, another Core Engineering Intern, thought of a way to optimize one of the internal tools used by the Community Team. After a conversation with our manager and one other person, he went ahead and implemented the change. I wanted the NYC Scala community to be more welcoming to people who are new to the language, so I proposed hosting a ny-scala Meetup that included a beginner session at Meetup HQ. Meetup’s technical recruiter and office manager were super supportive and one of the engineers introduced me to the organizer of the ny-scala Meetup group. We made it happen!

Company Culture

A survey of an organization’s Slack channels is pretty informative. Virtually all Slack channels at Meetup are open to join. Joining Slack channels to participate in conversations we care about allows us to contribute in ways beyond what’s laid out for our role/team.

Two Slack channels I found interesting were #news-squad and #diversity. In #news-squad, we discuss how we can show our support to Meetup communities in light of events such as the Brussels bombings and shooting in Orlando earlier this year. In #diversity, conversations revolve around the following:

• ways we can work with other Union Square Venture portfolio companies to foster dialogue about diversity
• examples of how other tech companies iterate on their product to make it more inclusive
• share articles and events we can attend that might broaden our perspective about diversity issues

There’s a distinction between a company having relatively better diversity stats vs it having a work environment where people of diverse backgrounds feel welcome and supported. Meetup’s workplace must encourage diversity to thrive because diversity is essential to Meetup’s product and mission.

After the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, some staff started compiling examples of social justice Meetup groups (MUGs) or MUGs inspired to action by recent events, the goal being to shine a spotlight on these MUGs next time a tragedy occurs. Meetup’s CEO, Scott Heiferman, met with Senator Gillibrand to discuss #BLM/racial-justice/gun-control issues. Scott also posted this in the #diversity Slack channel:

“Let’s have a company culture where we talk more about the tough stuff facing the real world, not less. Why? Because unlike most companies, our work not only relates to issues like #blm, our work is part of the solution. Even meetups not directly about movements or politics or empowerment.. actually make a more equitable, more just world.”

Meetup puts their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity. The machine learning engineers examine their algorithms and models to avoid propagating stereotypes; for instance, they make sure tech Meetups are recommended to women. Anne DeCusatis, a core engineer, gave talks at PyCon and Open Source Bridge to advocate for gender data collection best practices. After we watched her rehearse her talk in the office, some of the engineers pitched in feedback. Her suggestion to make gender data collection more inclusive of non-binary gender identities has also been integrated into the product.

Mentorship

This summer, each intern was paired with an engineering mentor. My mentor, Caroline Marcks, is the engineering lead of the member engagement team. She explained parts of the codebase to me, broke down engineering problems into discrete tasks for me to work on, answered questions when I got stuck on something technical, reviewed my code, and offered to pair program sometimes. After she assigned me a dedicated project, I proposed several designs first and then we whiteboarded together to iterate on my proposal and hammer out a final system design. Caroline is an excellent engineer and communicator. With her mentorship, I was productive and felt like I reached my potential this summer.

Interns also have an engineering manager. My manager, Jake Levine, and I met regularly to discuss my goals and anything that was blocking me. Jake also got the current and former engineering interns together for lunch so we could learn about the former interns’ experiences during and after their internship.

Meetup’s CTO, Yvette Pasqua, invited the interns out to lunch and asked us what we thought about the internship program. She listened intently, asking lots of clarifying questions, and even offered to set up an Ask-me-anything if we wanted to continue the conversation. On the last day of my internship, she came to my desk to say goodbye, thanked me for my hard work, and invited me to email her any time if I had questions about Meetup or wanted career advice.

Perks & Quirks

• Open Source Guild: a working group that meets regularly to establish the culture and process around open-sourcing our software
• bug bounty
• engineering book club
• quarterly hackathons where anyone can prototype something that they think should be integrated into the product or dev process
• organizer lunches: Meetup’s community engagement manager invites organizers of various Meetup groups to come to the office to chat about how they use the platform. The organizer lunches I’ve experienced involved really good catered food, salsa dancing, laughter yoga, and meditation (nothing beats a laughter yoga session in the middle of the work day).
• monthly Celebration: a company-wide gathering to celebrate work anniversaries and team accomplishments
• weekly rooftop BBQs during the summer. The view is magnificent.
• breakfast on Tuesdays
• picnic and cook-off in Prospect Park
• Baller Lunches: an internal Meetup group where anyone can organize Baller Lunch Meetups
• Super Cool DIO Meetup: another internal Meetup group. In the past, people have organized Meetups to have a movie night, co-work with cats at Little Lions Cat Cafe, and check out the ITP spring show together.
• DOG-FRIENDLY OFFICE! Oreo and Bo (photographed below) are two of the Meetup dogs.

Intern perks

• Lunch n Learns: Meetup provides lunch as we chat with the CEO, CTO, CFO, Director of Product and Director of Talent & Culture about their work and goals
• Union Sq Ventures Intern Day: a day of networking for interns at Union Square Ventures portfolio companies. We started the day at Union Square Ventures with a presentation about their network and portfolio, then toured the offices of portfolio companies such as MongoDB, SoundCloud and Meetup.

Hiring Process

• phone chat with technical recruiter
• technical phone screen
• open-ended take-home project (you’re not expecte to spend more than 3 hours on this)
• onsite interviews (I met with 4 people); one of the other interns goes to school out of state and did these interviews remotely

Questions?

If you’re passionate about engineering and Meetup’s mission, feel free to reach out with questions: emchennyc[at]gmail[dot]com