Tacktern Series: How a remote internship re-sparked my love of programming

By Harrison Chun

As a student at University of Waterloo studying Computational Mathematics, I’ve had the opportunity to intern several times at different companies. As excited as I was about my summer internship with Thumbtack, I was also partially worried. My past internship experiences were quite discouraging. They deteriorated my passion for software development and left me burnt out. I was anxious about the possibility that this internship could be the same and lead me down a path where I end up disliking my career.

Spoiler alert: Thumbtack gave me an experience better than I could have ever hoped for and re-sparked my love for programming.

Becoming part of the Thumbtack team

My internship was as a backend engineer for the HomeCare team, building new and augmenting old endpoints to aid users in managing their homes and seasonal maintenance tasks more efficiently. My main technical stacks were: Golang, SQL, GraphQL, and Thrift. These are all technologies that I wanted hands-on experience with, especially in a workplace. Not only did I become fluent in those technologies, I learned how to design a code properly that would cater to our company’s architecture.

I had an amazing mentor throughout this internship who gave me great feedback on all my code reviews. He taught me how to think ahead and look at the bigger picture when I code, instead of just focusing on resolving the issue at hand. I learned to approach problems more methodically, instead of bullishly solving the problem straight from my head to the editor.

This was also my first time experiencing what it is actually like to be collaborating with other engineers as part of a team. I was never treated as a “student intern”, but respected as another engineer. My manager constantly encouraged me to ask questions, bounce ideas off the team, and to voice my opinions.

Embracing the virtual-first work culture

With a remote internship, I imagined I would have a copious amount of trouble getting stuck and constantly having my workflow halted waiting for responses online. Thankfully, Thumbtack provided me with tools and guidelines that helped me get through this internship with minimal blockings.

Whenever I was stuck on issues that I did not know how to deal with, I would always ask my teammates or ask on Slack public channels for company wide outreach. Thumbtack had numerous Slack channels for specific purposes and many of them were opened for questions.

I received speedy replies from many engineers with insightful recommendations and opinions on my issues. This type of workflow made me comfortable reaching out and I became more knowledgeable with the company’s tech stack by the day.

The engineers were also not afraid to use Zoom as a useful tool of communication. Working remotely lacks the convenience of just walking over to someone’s desk to quickly collaborate. Over the course of this internship, I had several short Zoom meetings with other engineers to quickly sync up on projects. We would answer each other’s questions as well as propose our own designs and solutions on the fly. This productively eliminated a lot of blockers and gave me a chance to have educational in-person engineer experiences while being remote.

The combination of these effective use of online communication tools helped me learn and be more productive than any of the in person internships I’ve had.

Looking ahead to what’s next

I feel genuinely grateful for my time at Thumbtack and will cherish this experience for the rest of my career. Thumbtack has set a benchmark for me of what a healthy and enjoyable working environment is. Right now, I love the idea of coming back for a full-time position after my graduation and I cannot thank my teammates enough for this overwhelming experience that gave me the opportunity to re-ignite my passion for software engineering.