Learnings From My Software Engineering Internship At SSENSE

You may ask yourself who that good looking young man is in the middle of the picture. Well, that’s me. I am a Software Engineering student at Concordia University, and at the time of this writing, I’m in my second year of studies. I am also currently 4 months into my co-op internship at SSENSE, which has been my first ever experience as a professional software developer. In this article, I will reflect upon my internship experience and the value it brings to students like myself. If you are currently a student in this field and are starting or considering an internship in the future, this article is for you!

My Background

To give you some context of my skills prior to my internship, I started coding exactly a year before my internship and never had any software work experience. This has been my first impression of an office work environment.

First Impressions at SSENSE

When I first joined the company in the beginning of September 2019, I was introduced to my ‘buddy’, a designated colleague to whom I can turn to for friendly advice and support with all company-related matters. As I began setting up my workspace with my buddy, I realized just how much I would have to learn at SSENSE, seeing that I didn’t know half of the frameworks and technologies that I would be using throughout my internship. Not only that, but how lucky I was to be given a tour of the office to meet people from other departments. This helped me learn about their day to day routines and workloads.

Technical Skills

School gave me an opportunity to learn many important concepts like data structures, algorithms, and system hardware, but I had no idea how to apply them in the workplace. Fortunately, our co-op program allowed me to build a broader understanding of my field of study, and learn many things that aren’t taught at school. I would highly recommend co-op and internship programs to any student who has such an opportunity.

There are a lot of cases where academic theory falls short of translating to tangible skills. Git is a great example of this. At school, I had learned that Git and GitHub would help me in my field as a developer. As simple as it may seem, in school they do not always teach you how to apply such tools to real projects, since they focus more heavily on reading materials and theory. While reading documentation, if you are not applying what you read in real use-cases, it is easy to forget what you’ve learned. At work, doing regular pull-requests, code reviews, and conflict resolution made it a lot easier to learn how to use GitHub properly, as the veterans at work always have some small tips and tricks to help you improve.

It would be hard to create an exhaustive list of all the new tools and technologies I learned at SSENSE, but to give you an idea of the breadth of exposure real work experience can give you, the following is a list of languages, frameworks, tools, and concepts that were a core part of my work and have helped me grow the most:

• Languages: I was able to work on many repositories which allowed me to learn new languages like Python and Typescript.
• Testing: Working in real code bases taught me how to build test suites and write test cases in the languages mentioned above. Testing is undoubtedly very useful and has significantly improved my code quality.
• Deployment Tools: Another issue with academic projects is that we often do not have complex deployments. Working with an enterprise scale architecture exposed me to deployment tools such as Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Monitoring Tools: These are another class of tools that you might not be exposed to unless you have worked with larger applications. At SSENSE, I was exposed to Datadog, New Relic, and Kibana.
• API Request Tools: Some tools like Postman and Insomnia allowed me to create API requests and store responses. These can simplify and speed up your development process.
• Architectural Concepts: Working at SSENSE was my first exposure to a real world microservices architecture deployed on cloud-based infrastructure.

While I may not be an expert at any of the technologies and concepts I listed, I am happy to say that I have worked enough with them to understand when and how to apply them.

Personal Skills

Apart from developing new technical skills, I also learned how to collaborate professionally in a team. Since my internship at SSENSE was my first internship, I had previously never coded in a collaborative work environment. When I first started, my team didn’t waste any time in giving me meaningful and challenging work. It should come as no surprise that I wasn’t sure if my code would be acceptable. However, my team always backed me up with reviews, mentorship, and technical support, which gave me confidence in my own work.

At SSENSE, we work with the scrum methodology, due to which I learned how to work in an agile environment. An agile ecosystem involves many ceremonies which help us track the state of our progress and present our work regularly. These allowed me to better assess any given situation and taught me to better express my opinions. For example, when estimating the complexity of a task, the team is encouraged to ask questions and point out things that others may not have thought about. By doing this exercise routinely, I noticed that the way I share my ideas and the way that I think about a problem has changed a lot, for the better.

What’s next?

This internship experience reaffirmed my belief that I made the right career choice. The variety of work that I was given made me a more curious student and increased my appetite for learning new concepts in programming and software engineering. Even though we had meetings more frequently than I expected, I enjoyed the collaborative mindset that SSENSE fosters, and I hope that in the future I will find a job in an organization with a similar environment. Ultimately, this was a great experience for a first internship, and I would say that SSENSE gave me a great base for my career to come. What I plan to do now is to go back to school and apply everything I have learned here.

Editorial reviews by Yoann Phung Van, Akambi Fagbohoun Bernard Roach, Jose Flores, Deanna Chow, Liela Touré & Prateek Sanyal.

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