Rise
This is part of a larger post reflecting upon my summer. You can find that here!
Interning at Rise was a huge part of my day-to-day life over the summer, and I’m super privileged to have gotten this opportunity. It’s hard to name a singular thing that I enjoyed the most, but I really liked the balance between move fast/break things/#yolo ship it and ensuring the highest quality work. I was writing code within a few hours of getting there on my first day, and I was working on the same projects that the full-timers were. Throughout the summer, I enjoyed that the company structure and processes we went through made me feel like I was always properly prioritizing what I was working on. I always got my code reviewed (and learned an incredible amount from it), but I was still able to frequently land code into the master branch. Perhaps the most exciting part of building the Rise app was our bi-weekly ship nights where we wouldn’t leave until we pushed a new version to the App Store. Needless to say, sometimes things took longer than expected and we were in the office past midnight fixing bugs :)
I loved that the people I worked with were mission-driven. We’d be visibly elated when people wrote in telling us how much weight they had lost or how much better they felt after using Rise. We had healthy snacks (I will forever love KIND bars and kale chips), and we frequently chatted about health and nutrition, which I personally take an interest in. We even did pushups together! Not only did I come out of this summer a better engineer, I also have become a healthier human being.
We had a Slackbot that posted whenever we got reviews in the App Store. I think this one below put this biggest smile on my face. It was super satisfying working on a product that is helping people live longer and better lives.
I was super sad to leave at the end of my internship, but I know this team is going to do great things, and I’m excited to see what Rise will become. :)
