My Internship Experience at Chime: Max Wang
In the summer of 2022, Chime’s internship program hosted 17 students across engineering, product, business, and communications. This post, written by our Security Engineering intern, Max Wang, is a look at his summer experience.
Hi, I’m Max Wang. I’m a Computer Science & Statistics student from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I worked as a Security Engineering Intern with Chime’s Product Security team this summer.
My Internship in a Nutshell
It’s been really fun to work at Chime here in San Francisco — at our new office, which just opened last month. One of the first things I noticed and appreciated was how member-obsessed everyone is. It’s also hard to miss how friendly and approachable Chimers (Chime employees) are (including the founders!).
During my internship, I got hands-on experience working with Ruby on Rails, React, Tailwind, Terraform, and AWS S3. I also refined my Git skills and coding practices via code review sessions and internal workshops. At the same time, my cultural mentor Rachna Bafna provided guidance on my soft skills and helped me better envision my career trajectory.
My Projects
As a Security intern, I mainly worked on two projects that revolved around Monocle. What is Monocle? Monocle is Chime’s internal security observability app that powers strategic engineering and security decisions by pulling together key information from across our tools. In short, it’s a ‘super app’ for Chime’s internal security metrics.
Project 1: Improving Dependabot Pull Request Reminders
My first project was to improve Monocle’s Slack notification system, which sends messages to each repository’s Slack channel to remind engineers to merge open Dependabot pull requests, thus resolving vulnerabilities. A teammate had already built a feature to send a general reminder message, but the message didn’t specifically mention the engineers responsible for fixing the vulnerability. I wanted to make responding to issues even easier and thought that mentioning the specific, responsible engineer would do the trick.
My solution to this was to fetch Chime’s service ownership data to identify the people in charge of a particular high-priority repository. For instance, in our updated reminder messages, the Engineering Manager’s and Stewards’ names are also mentioned in the message. This results in more team ownership, speeds up pull request merges, and encourages fixes to happen more quickly.
Project 2: Building a Teams Dashboard for Monocle
Now, let’s move to my second project.
The current Monocle homepage houses a lot of information and data, which can be difficult for new users to navigate through and find the security guidance they need. The homepage is not organized by team. Teams and engineering leaders need to visit multiple repository pages to find essential security information.
To enhance the user experience and make it simpler to understand our security posture, my mentor, David Trejo, and I created an easy-to-use Teams Dashboard that will help managers, directors, and VPs to visualize how their teams are doing with respect to security. There, they can view and monitor all production repositories under their management at a glance. This Teams Dashboard serves as a medium for the management team to quickly identify and prioritize repositories that need more security investment and, hence, reduce the risk of security issues while maximizing the safety of Chime’s members. The design of this page was guided by helpful feedback from the Security team and other Chimers.
Extra: The Chime Hackathon
Another highlight of my internship was the first annual Hackathon event at Chime. More than 300 Chimers participated in it!
I was fortunate to collaborate with a new team of talented people on a Mobile hackathon project. Our goal was to build an easy, intuitive in-app experience for our members to submit feedback. It was an enriching experience for me to work so closely with engineers, designers, product managers, and engineering managers. I got exposure to our mobile stack — React native and Xcode. I also paired with another engineer, Dolly Ma, to add Emoji ratings and image uploads to the feedback form.
Even though every team was working hard on their own projects, other teams were extremely helpful to us. For example, when I was stuck on setting up the mobile development environment, Chen Su, a member of a different hackathon team, jumped in to help. We set up all our environments successfully, and Chen Su’s team collected valuable user feedback and pain points on how to streamline Chime’s mobile development for his own hackathon project.
I really enjoyed the hackathon week, and our team won Runner Up for the Be Member Obsessed Award. What’s more exciting is that Chime’s hackathon projects could potentially influence real product features, so Chime members might enjoy our work someday! Woohoo!
Walking Away Inspired
My summer has been exciting and challenging, and it has driven me to innovate in ways I didn’t expect. I learned so much from my mentors, teammates, and other Chimers. I loved watching Chimers push forward on our mission and can’t wait to see what Chime achieves next!
– Max Wang
