SSS: Sahil’s Strava Summer
Way back in September 2021 a young me was browsing for internships when I stumbled across a peculiar name: Strava. I’d never heard of it before but glancing over their website and seeing a role for iOS development pushed me to at least send out an application. A few weeks later, despite having passed the first round of interviewing I was debating whether or not I should withdraw my application.
I know, I know, why in the world would such ridiculous thoughts have crossed my mind!? Well you see (and I’m sure anyone else who’s been in the job market can attest to this) I had spent the last few months grueling through interview after interview, jumping through hurdles designed to test my knowledge of inconspicuous computer science topics that were seldom relevant to the position at hand. Yet finally, I had received an offer from another company and I was considering throwing in the towel with Strava as I was frankly exhausted with interviews.
Although, something in the back of my head told me to keep going with Strava. You see Strava was the only company that actually appeared to view me as a human being instead of some coding monkey who must invert a binary tree to prove my worth. The questions that were asked in Strava’s technical interviews were relevant to the job and engaging. The interviewers were kind and funny and made the process genuinely enjoyable. I reasoned that such an outlier in an otherwise dystopian job interviewing process must be explored and my efforts were rewarded with an offer!
As I was deciding where I would spend Summer 2022 I asked my peers and family members which company they thought I should choose. Every single one of them said Strava. And so I took the leap and had the best summer internship I could ask for.
The end…
WAIT. I know what you’re thinking, what about the actual internship!?? Don’t worry, we’re getting there, the pause was just for narrative effect.
Okay fast forward to Summer 2022. I know what you’re thinking, “Week one of any job is just onboarding blah blah blah,” and yeah you’re right that’s exactly what happened. SIKE no it’s not. Unlike other companies where it takes 20 years to get access to all the tools and software necessary to get started at Strava I was up and running instantly. I had merged my first changes into main by the end of the week. Yes you read that right, main as in the master branch. The message was clear, Strava doesn’t treat their interns like second rate employees but does their absolute best to help you make real meaningful changes.
By the time the second and third weeks rolled around I had already found my groove. I had met several other teammates and joined every slack channel out there (would recommend #kiddens and #raccoons). These first few weeks were also the perfect opportunity to explore the iOS codebase and familiarize myself by working on small tickets. The work would prove to be instrumental in helping me hit the ground running when I started working on my summer project.
The project was a hugely requested feature that athletes had been asking about for quite a while. Since the dawn of time Strava athletes have been saving the routes they enjoy traversing on the Saved Routes tab. For those that have hundreds of routes saved you can imagine the agony of scrolling through your routes to finally find the one cycling route you’ve been looking for. Until we came along searching or filtering these routes was impossible.
Yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking, “Did you just say we?” Why yes I did my curious reader, yes I did.
Enter my fellow intern friends Emily, Navika and Ryan. Respectively they were the server, web, and android engineers tasked with tackling this problem as well. Over the course of the next several weeks we worked closely together to help bring this feature to life. Working with these other interns was an incredibly fun and rewarding experience that elevated the quality of my experience from amazing to AMAZINGGG.
There’s countless other parts of this internship that were incredible and uniquely Strava. From AMAs with the CEO and other executives to engaging intern events and 1:1s with people from the Metro team and data analytics/ machine learning to jams week to weekly all hands.
The list could go on and on but in my opinion the most incredible part of this internship was the impact I was able to make in such a short amount of time. The changes and additions I have made in the Strava iOS app are everlasting and the trust and guidance my team invested in me allowed me to pursue all sorts of challenging problems with complete autonomy. Most companies would never give an intern the opportunity to make such important decisions but this quality is a testament to what it means to be an intern at Strava.
End note:
Special thanks to Kelsey Aamoth, Julia Geraghty, Tom Drummond, Kevin Hertel, Rakesh Shah, Renee Swischuk, Oliver Pfeffer, Steve Lee, Dulce Palacios Aristondo, Emily Tomz, Ryan Paragas, Navika Budhraja, Mathew Puryear, Caleb Rudnicki for everything this internship.
