An Intern’s Story at MedEngine
My first encounter with MedEngine took place in March 2018. The company was sponsoring a health-focused hackathon at my university, and Philipp and Oscar both came along to help out. My team and I got talking to them early on, and they gave us a lot of helpful advice throughout. When we won their sponsor prize at the end, I exchanged email addresses with the guys, and a couple of weeks later Philipp asked if I wanted to come out to Berlin for the summer. I was over the moon, and of course, accepted without hesitation!
I’d been to Berlin the previous summer, but only for a few days, and two months would be longer than I’d ever spent continuously out of the UK before, so I was feeling a little nervous as I stepped off the plane at Schönefeld airport into the late July heat (Berlin was way warmer than I expected). However, aside from a small accommodation-related hiccup, everything went pretty smoothly, even with my almost total ignorance of the German language. Coming from London, the main thing that struck me was how cheap everything was — €3.50 pints were by no means unusual, and I could actually afford to eat out!
Turning up to the office on my first day hilariously overdressed (again with the Berlin heat, and I didn’t get the memo about the shorts-heavy startup dress code) I met the rest of the team, and was given a tour of Ahoy! Berlin, the coworking space. The place was really nice, with a few of the usual tech scene trappings (table football, lots of beards) and everyone was super friendly. Once we’d completed all the onboarding stuff, I was let loose on the codebase. I was gonna be doing mostly mobile development in React Native for MedEngine’s app suite, something with which I had pretty much zero direct experience, and so everything was new and interesting, and I quickly got totally engrossed. RN is a great technology — it’s a lot of fun to write in, and I got the chance to experience working on a range of different problems and tasks, from building messaging systems that interact with the Slack API to pure frontend redesign. I’d messed around on various projects before but this was the first time I’d ever worked on something that would make its way into the real world and actually be used by and help people, which was honestly a really really great feeling. The experience of writing a component and then getting to immediately interact with it and see it work on one of the iPhones can be very a motivating one.
I was lucky to have a great mentor in Oscar, who imparted a lot of wisdom both technical and otherwise, and helped me whenever I found myself struggling with any particular problem in the code. The rest of the team were great too, and made me feel extremely welcome and included! As well as purely technical stuff, I got to learn a lot about the whole development workflow, in terms of stuff like the sprints and scrums of agile development, code review and version control.
As far as highlights go, there were a few experiences that stood out as things I’ll definitely remember when I look back on the summer. Foremost amongst these is probably the MedEngine birthday barbecue, which was held to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the company’s founding.
I’m not sure exactly how much beer was purchased, or for that matter how much was drunk, but we spent a good portion of the afternoon moving crates around, and I know I definitely didn’t make it in for 9 am the next morning… The other experience that comes most to mind is the time we spent trying to build a new app entirely from scratch in two days. Although pretty intense, this was actually pretty fun and taught me a lot about developing to tight deadlines and prioritising speed over perfection. Plus, when we did actually get it working it was pretty satisfying! Aside from the big things like these, there was a lot of small aspects of the culture that really helped make the two months particularly enjoyable/memorable, like company dinners at the lovely restaurants and bars around Prenzlauer Berg, the entertaining presentations from other team members (Hardcore Hardware could not have been more educational), the excellent memes on Slack, and all the great Ahoy lunches.
All in all, I had a really great time, I learned a huge amount, and I’m excited to see what’s next for MedEngine!
