Being an Infrastructure Engineering Intern PlanGrid
I had the amazing opportunity to work at PlanGrid as an Infrastructure Engineering Intern during Summer 2018 (May-August). I applied to PlanGrid through my university’s internal job board.
I wanted to write this post to describe my experience at PlanGrid, from the company culture to some of the projects I worked on.
What Does PlanGrid Do?
PlanGrid is a bit of an obscure name, owing to the industry we operate in: construction. PlanGrid is “construction productivity software” that provides “the tools needed to collaborate effectively and collect and manage project information throughout the project’s construction and operations lifespan”. We’re a mid-sized startup located in San Francisco.
I had a hard time explaining PlanGrid to my non-tech family, until a coworker aptly suggested “blueprints in the cloud”.
First Week at PlanGrid
New hires at PlanGrid spend their first week learning about the company as a whole; we went over how the construction industry works, how the PlanGrid app works, and how PlanGrid solves long-standing problems in an industry that had yet to see technological innovation. PlanGrid is not just about storing blueprints — we aim to integrate with the various workflows that users experience in their day-to-day to help them maximize productivity.
The Infra Team
The infrastructure team at PlanGrid is subdivided into three teams: Systems Engineering, DevOps, and ReleaseOps.
I was on the DevOps team, though my work touched on the other teams’ as well.
Our Stack
As an infrastructure engineer, I worked on the platform that supports the services we run here at PlanGrid. I got to work with the following tools:
Projects
I’ll talk briefly about the projects I worked on at PlanGrid.
One thing that I really appreciated about working at PlanGrid was that they would suggest projects to me, and let me choose what to work on depending on my interests. The team really cared about my personal growth as an engineer, which I am extremely thankful for.
Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscalers
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/
Goal: Create a way to automatically deploy Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPAs) with our apps
This project allowed me to accomplish something I had really wanted to do: spin up my own Kubernetes cluster, in AWS, to break at my own leisure 😏.
I had to:
- Learn about the different Kubernetes components (mainly the controller manager) to figure out how to configure our clusters to enable HPAs
- Learn about authentication within the cluster (RBAC)
- Find my way around Spinnaker, which is how we deploy our Kubernetes applications, since we would want HPAs to be deployed with our apps
This project also spawned some fun side projects. For hack week, I worked on a project to allow us to scale on custom metrics from Datadog, since we care more about scaling on metrics like queue size. I also used the Kubernetes client-go for the first time (and learned go!) to write a custom controller.
Some other projects included:
- Creating a v2.0 of an internal settings management tool, written in Go
- Create a pipeline for us to run to generate flame graphs for our applications
Culture
Culture is a word you hear come up frequently when talking about tech companies. I think you’d really need to come here to experience it, but PlanGrid has one of the most open, welcoming, and supportive environments I’ve experienced. I was always encouraged to ask questions — directing them not only to my amazing mentor, but also everyone on the infrastructure team, who were always willing to help out.
We also went on some outings; I had a blast going to Napa Valley with my team, and the Exploratorium with the other interns and mentors.
One of the managers also arranged for us to go on a construction site visit to see our product being used out on the field. Being able to connect with customers, and tangibly see how our product impacts their daily work, was eye-opening and awesome.
Also — can’t complain about free food.
Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone at PlanGrid. I had an amazing summer thanks to the team.
