Opportunity Arises From the Most Unexpected
About Me:
Hey there! My name is Ryan, and I come from an unconventional background. I am not like most interns from the group in 2022. I’ve dropped out of college 3 times, worked in different fields for about 10 years, then transitioned into a bootcamp. Now working with Strava, they have set the expectation of what it should be like working in a professional environment.
My Experience at Strava:
Strava has been nothing but a wonderful experience. The weekly events they hosted to really engage the interns are motivational. The weekly AMAs were definitely my favorite of all the intern events. We got to meet the leaders of Strava and get to know them personally. The person I was most inspired by was Claude Jones. Claude also came from an unconventional background. He is a self taught programmer and worked his was up to VP of Engineering, leads motivational talks, and writes his own children books. From him I’ve learned that even if I don’t come from a university, then I’ll be able to make it in this field. So long as I continue to develop myself.
Aside from all the events we got to participate in, the support from my team, mentors, and managers provided for me was a whole new experience. I was given the chance to learn so much, and that definitely did not go to waste.
The Project:
I am on the Athlete Services Team, and my team’s project was to create filters for the Saved Routes. The designs wanted us to be able to filter by sport, key word, distance, elevation, whether the route is starred or not, and who it is created by.
Development:
Creating this feature sounds easy right? Get the state of the filters, save it to the sheet, and apply it to the query. Yes, but there is more to it. The routes presenter and all of its associated classes are huge. So the android team wants to start refactoring that class into separate presenters, view delegates, and filter factories. Which I had the pleasure to start. In all honesty, I am really happy that I got to start my own presenter and it associated classes. I got the chance to learn how to link all the classes, inflate the views, and manage the logic between all of Saved Routes and the main presenter.
All of this is very new to me since I’ve never seen a project of this scale and I’ve never really programmed in Kotlin before. There was so much to process in such a little amount of time that I started to get overwhelmed and really doubted my ability to pull off this project. But the guidance and reassurance from my mentors and manager, Jason, really helped me take a deep breathe and knick away at it one piece at a time.
This is Strava, and Strava is Awesome:
I really didn’t want this blog post to be heavily focused on my project, but more about my time and experiences here at Strava. Just recently, I was talking to my fellow intern, Navika, and we talked about what we really want out of a career and what values do we want to align ourselves when selecting a company to work for. And Strava hits all of them for me. Strava has fostered an environment of just pure support. The collective mindset of wanting to better ourselves and each other, and that is what I want out of a professional environment. So that one day, I could be the person on the other end helping new software engineers.
Big Shoutouts:
I want to shout out my mentors Artem, Jeremy, and Pierre. Artem being my assigned mentor has helped me get on my feet as a programmer. He is extremely knowledgable and has answered every question with patience. Jeremy was another android developer who has moved on from Strava. But during his time still here and during my internship, he helped me with the refactoring of the saved routes logic. His guidance really helped make it manageable on top of teaching me how it all works. I greatly appreciate all the knowledge he’s passed on to me. Pierre is one of our Android guild leaders and my interim mentor while Artem was out on FTO. Pierre’s reviews on my code really forced me to think differently about how I need to code. Simply thinking about how business logic should be written.
I’d also like to shoutout my fellow interns on my team. The fellow interns being Sahil, Emily, Navika, and Yuwen. We got together every week since the start of our internship just to casually talk. They made the camaraderie feel real. It can be hard when you are working solely from home and really feel the connections between people. But this group of individuals definitely made it feel real. Having gone through this internship with these people really made me feel less lost compared to the first few weeks!
