An Exploration into the Inspiration of Memes
Landing an internship is tough. I sometimes look back at last year when I was heavily applying and cannot believe how lucky I am to have landed Strava. So many things had to go right for me to be where I am now. For instance, I was originally planning on not attending the career fair at UC Berkeley that Strava was participating in. Had I not gone to the career fair, I would not have applied to Strava. However, everything went right and I managed to get an internship at Strava.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my internship at Strava. I had so much fun, in fact, that I even made some memes that were influenced by my internship. I believe that these memes represent my experience — and even my journey — at Strava fairly clearly. This is why I have decided to write my intern blog post about the memes I have created because of Strava.
When I initially started at Strava, I was absolutely helpless. I had never worked with such a large codebase before and found that navigating it was quite the challenge. Furthermore, the team that I was put on was working on something I had never done before. They were modularizing the Activity Details page so that it could be server driven. In essence, we were creating little UI building blocks so that the server could rearrange the layout of the page easily.
Because of these obstacles, the first month was filled with me asking questions to everybody around me. I will be the first to admit, many of the questions I asked were not the smartest. It was during this time that I came up with this meme.
If I were to tag all the people that I thought of while creating it, I would have to pretty much tag everyone I know at Strava.
After some time passed, I started to get comfortable with the code base and I started to create pull requests (a request for someone else to review my code) on a regular basis. However, I started to notice a pattern that my pull requests took a great deal longer to get accepted than my colleagues. I remember the first module (UI building block) that I built was called the Stats-Grid module. It is the module that displays your stats on the Activity Details page. You can see the module in the image on the left. When I finished working on the module, it ended up sitting in code review for 3 weeks. The average time someone’s pull request usually sits in code review for is a couple days.
At first, I thought this was just because I was getting thrown the issues that were not high in priority. However, after learning that Strava does give higher priority issues to interns, I realized it was because the quality of my code was sub-par. Which led to my next meme.
I wanted to let my colleagues know that my bad code was in no way a reflection of UC Berkeley’s Computer Science department.
However, as my internship went on, I got a lot better at coding. The last big module of my internship was called the Chart Bar Distribution module. This is the chart that is used to display your pace and power zones (seen on the left). Instead of taking three weeks to finish code review, this module only took a couple days. My skills as a coder improved exponentially through my internship and Strava.
Of course, a significant part of a software engineer’s job is not to just submit pull requests, it is also to review others’ pull requests. My first time that I got to review Emmanuel’s (the other iOS engineering intern) code, I got a little too excited.
Emmanuel is clearly trying to make me look bad here so that he gets the return offer!
Aside from code reviews, Strava has a process called 360 Performance Reviews, where your manager, fellow teammates, colleagues not on your team, and you yourself review you. Interns do not get one of these comprehensive reviews, but I did get to take part in it. One day, the director of engineering requested I review my engineering manager. For one day, I held all the power.
I asked my manager if he knew what memes were. He told me that his generation was the one that invented them. I gave him a glowing review.
I think that one of my favorite parts about working at Strava is the fact that my manager has fostered an environment where I feel comfortable expressing my true self. I have felt comfortable enough that I can joke around with my manager. This relationship between me and my manager is reflective of the culture of Strava as a whole. Although everyone knows how to work hard and deliver their work done on time, the atmosphere is still very light and fun. If this was not the case, I would not have made the previous meme, much less this blog post.
With my summer at Strava coming to an end, I want to give kudos to my manager Rodrigo Gutierrez, my mentor Michael Fransen, the iOS engineers on my team Jason Cheng and Kyle Ryan, the other fellow interns, and everyone that has supported me during my internship.
