My Segmentify Journey: From Intern to Part-Time Developer
“Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work.” — William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
In this article, I will talk about what it feels like to do an internship with a company as a senior student and start working there as a part-time developer and step into the corporate world before finishing school. I will tell you how my experience has caused a paradigm shift in my world.
I consider my last six months of experience as a transition. All the essential information given in the school and all the technical words I heard during my education, such as agile environments, software development processes, meetings, teamwork, pairwork, know-hows, big projects, deployments, applications, million, billion, quadrillion lines of code, stress management, product management, problems related to self-confidence, etc. This experience has been highly enriching for me regarding technical and soft skills.
It is a great blessing to have the chance to be directly involved in the team’s daily tasks. For example, they could’ve easily given me tasks that had nothing to do with the team’s primary mission and said they were necessary to improve myself. And yes, technically, I would have improved in the end. However, I wouldn’t be able to get the company culture.
Prior to this internship at Segmentify, I wasn’t used to teamwork and always preferred to work alone. However, now I can clearly see that this experience has changed me for the better. Over time, constantly talking to others, asking questions, examining our shortcomings, and solving problems together led me to see how cool teamwork is!
On the technical side, during my internship, I contributed to the research and analyses made during the development process by performing various tasks within the Search Team, which works to develop Segmentify’s Searchandising product. With the help of the tasks regarding this project and my mentor, I have gained a comprehensive understanding of Solr — an open-source, highly flexible search engine that is a part of the Apache Lucene project.
My Solr journey that started here encouraged me to contribute to this open-source Solr project after becoming a Junior Developer. As a result, the code I committed last week for UI development was merged! You never know what a 20-day internship experience will bring.
In addition to the assignments given to me during the internship, I also wrote daily reports to my mentor about what I did, learned, and researched. Each week I was given a new research topic: I’d do my research and write an essay with what I learned. This way, I gained extensive knowledge about DNS, git and GitHub, Continuous Integration, Jenkins, fuzzy logic, etc.
This is how my journey of blogging started. The benefits of regularly writing are innumerable to me. First and foremost, the knowledge ı’ve gained has flown away and will always be a record of it somewhere on the Internet. Secondly, I’m the one who wrote those articles that people were curious about or interested in!
Of course, there were times when I got stuck, couldn’t make progress, and lost my motivation, but now I realise that these times can be overcome by communication, asking for help, and doing the proper planning, not by pushing myself down even further.
As a result of my software engineering internship at Segmentify, I took part as an observer at every stage, from analysing the points that need to be developed in software to the time it was developed, tested, and deployed. As a result, I have gained experience figuring out the problem, the exact cause, how to solve it, the steps to be taken and how to plan while following this path. For example, I learned how to do indexing in a search engine by meeting with Solr, creating configset and collection that must be done before loading data. I also learned how to add a field-type, field, data, define a synonym, etc. Afterwards, I have performed an analysis by calculating how much time-saving the idea, which provides efficiency in terms of time during product feeding from Ignite, will save time if implemented. Additionally, I’ve observed and gained experience about the discipline and culture in business life on office days.
And that’s how my internship went. And when they asked me if I wanted to continue working together, of course, I wouldn’t have said no! So now I’ve been working at Segmentify for four months. I’m currently learning how to solve issues, improve, and examine the connections between Segmentify’s different products. My job also involves sending queries from Solr, learning about applications in the search team and preparing documents. In addition to that, I sometimes need to do something about Linux servers. Still, not only that, but I also get the opportunity to listen to what other teams are dealing with. I believe this is a very effective method to keep the connection and communication between teams alive.
And every day, even if I don’t have crucial and urgent tasks at hand, I feel that I am preparing myself for life as an engineer in the business and corporate spheres after school. I see this when my teammates talk about their daily tasks or when I attend their presentations, or when I spend time debugging codes just for the sake of trying, or when I prepare the documentation for an improvement that has been made after I test it.
I have seen that the knowledge gained at school comes to life in a company environment by fulfilling the given tasks and participating in projects. Therefore, even if there is a change, if there is no transition, the incoming information stays where it is, indicated by the quote in the introduction.
The most valuable thing I’ve learned on this journey at Segmentify is that you should join the dance if you want to learn.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post!
