The Interns Energize Summer
Medium’s summer interns, known fondly around the office as “the intern horde.”
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Medium’s inaugural batch of summer interns arrived in early June. In between a whitewater rafting trip on the American River, a weekend meditation retreat in the South Bay, and a series of Wednesday brown bag talks, the team of nine has accomplished a lot.
As the interns begin to say good-bye this week, we reflect on what their time at Medium has yielded, for everyone.
Crafting the internship
The interns have been busy. From search to homepage loading time to new and better internal tools, their contributions are visible and felt on Medium.
CTO Don Neufeld, who organized the internship program, designed it that way. An explicit goal was that the interns “have the experience of shipping code within their first week and, ideally, within the first couple of days.” There are no intern projects, which, Neufeld notes, was an intentional choice:
We thought it would be particularly motivating if interns could point to something on Medium at the end of the summer and say, ‘I made that.’ Their work isn’t sitting in some source control repository somewhere. And it turns out that we chose people who are really flexible, kind of scrappy, compelled to get in and figure things out. And they produce good work.
In setting up the program, Neufeld emphasized strong mentorship. Rather than “construct an artificial relationship” by throwing two people together, he “went to the mentors and said, here are the candidates we have and these are their backgrounds. Who would you be interested in working with?” One of the mentors, engineer Dan Pupius, notes, “From the beginning, the interns just seemed like regular members of the team, no special treatment or boondoggle projects needed. They’ve had a big impact on the product and have added a lot of energy.”
Meet the interns
They arrived at engineering, design, and business development in a variety of ways, but Medium’s interns share a drive to change the experience of reading and writing online.
Saul Carlin is currently an MBA candidate at Stanford, but he originally imagined a career in politics. While still an undergraduate Government major at Wesleyan, Carlin served as the deputy campaign manager for a state House race in Connecticut: “The candidate was 25 years old. We unseated a three-term incumbent, and it was a blast.” Carlin quickly realized, however, that “in politics you have a short window of opportunity to make a meaningful difference. Everything is contingent upon the next election and the next fundraising cycle.” He transferred his attention to media, applying that political experience as the director of special projects at Politico.
At Medium, Carlin works at “the intersection” of the Marketing Content and Communications and the Product Science teams: “How are we building value for users? That’s what’s exciting to me at this moment.” He is energized by the sense that “Medium is building something of sustainable value. It’s hard to find an organization where both content and platform are being thought about at the same level of intensity.”
Stephanie Yeung also didn’t originally imagine a career in technology. A rising senior studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Yeung “never really programmed before college” but was drawn to web development because she “wanted to build something like Neopets. I was really into Neopets.”
Yeung, who resides on the Reading and Discovery (RAD) team, helped build the search prototype, an early version of which appeared on the site last week. She also worked on an editorial scheduling tool, which allows Medium editors to schedule posts for the weekend. She readily acknowledges that Medium is a different undertaking than a website for virtual pets: “People want to share their ideas, and that motivates me. Here, I go home in the evening, and I just still really want to fix this bug or finish a feature or get something working.”
Self-motivation is a shared quality among the interns. Tess Rinearson, also a CS major from Carnegie Mellon, interned previously at Valve, Microsoft, and CloudMine. She often blogs about women in tech and frequents the East Coast hackathon scene. During the SOPA controversy in January 2012, Rinearson worked on a site, now Activist.io, that “lets you create widgets to call your congressional representatives with one click.”
With the RAD team, the first thing Rinearson engineered at Medium was the Top 100, a collection of the most-read posts each month that debuted at the beginning of June. The feature was experimental, but, Rinearson notes, it was so well received that she’s now “building it to last. Earlier in the summer, I was at a party and a stranger standing next to me was reading the Top 100 on his phone and talking about it to his friend. It was crazy.”
The interns are honing their skills, but many of them are also exploring new areas of programming at Medium. Previously an intern at Google, Kyle Hardgrave, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that all of his prior experience was in front-end web development. This summer, with the intention of diversifying his skill set, he worked with the Platform team on back-end tools and improving services and code.
Hardgrave spent a year and a half at Penn heading up PennApps Labs, an organization that hires students to build software for use by the student body. He is deeply interested in education: “Coursera and MOOCs and the future of education are fascinating. I want to work on things that make a real, positive difference. What makes me happy here,” Hardgrave reflects, “is the way people in the office talk about Medium and think about the problems they’re trying to solve. I love the design and engineering sensibilities. The emphasis is on quality code, and the principles behind the code are ones I admire.”
The interns are a well-rounded group, with interests that span not only technology but culture, media, and academic research. Xixia Wang is a computer science major with a minor in East Asian Studies at Princeton. In past summers, Wang held research internships at the University of Pittsburgh, CMU, and her home institution. An itch to build things for a broader audience brought her to Medium, where she can be found coding, “quietly relentless,” as Jason Stirman puts it, with pink headphones on: “I’m not superstitious, but when she leaves, I’m buying pink headphones.”
Wang, who developed a lot of her front-end skills through “online self-teaching,” worked primarily on internal tools at Medium. She helped build Hi5, a tool that allows Medium employees to give virtual, public high fives for anything from soliciting user feedback to caching the homepage to organizing poker night. She also contributed to Pulse, which measures core metrics of internal activity, and Statusboard, an iPad app that displays Pulse data. Of Medium, Wang observes, “I really like how standardized the writing experience is. I’m curious about how it will keep—people want more and more personalization—but it allows users to focus on the writing. You just write, and we’ll make things pretty for you.”
The decisions that go into creating the user’s writing experience are what interest David Byrd as well. Byrd is a student at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he created a curriculum on digital product design. His course of study involves, in his words, “understanding why we value things, from a philosophical point of view, plus computer science and design.”
A custom-made college curriculum appealed to Byrd, who worked for a startup called Shoptiques while at NYU. He took a semester off to step in as CTO of the company when his boss quit, an experience that was its own kind of individualized study: ”I did a lot of stupid things, so it was a great experience—I learned the hard way, not only are these stupid things to do but why.” A front-end engineer, Byrd implemented new UX designs and features at Medium, changing the way users interact with shared drafts and other parts of the collaborative writing process.
Neufeld notes that Medium hired interns partly based on “how their history intersected with issues relevant to the product.” Previously an intern at the Washington Post, Gianni Chen was initially attracted to Medium because he appreciates minimalist design and a product that is “thoughtful and sophisticated despite its simplicity.” Chen, who hails from Vancouver, studies Digital Media Design at Penn. He began school convinced he would work in 3D animation but, he says, “I realized I really enjoy the fundamentals of programming. And I like doing user-facing things, working on something and knowing that, in two weeks, the world will see it.”
With the Creation and Feedback team, Chen contributed to collaborative activity items: mentions, private conversations in notes, and published drafts on which a user collaborated now appear in the user’s notification stream. He also helped develop user and collection search. Chen can be reserved but becomes positively loquacious when he discusses the work that motivates him: “There’s a Chinese proverb: Time is made by people. If you really want something, you’ll make time for it. Working in an environment full of smart, driven people here helps. It gets me really excited about going to work and spending time on the product.”
Several of the interns have experienced a personal aesthetic evolution that attracts them to Medium. Jordan Scales, a computer science student at the Stevens Institute of Technology, notes that his own website evolved from a Flash-heavy, cluttered design to extreme minimalism, making him particularly sympathetic to Medium’s design ethos: “It’s such a beautiful site. Working here, and seeing all of the decisions people make is wild—everyone pays attention to every little thing, and it shows.” Working on the RAD team, Scales helped implement Medium’s share on Facebook capability, as well as search and new user flows for sign-in.
A New Jersey native, Scales is, unlike the cast of his hometown’s eponymous reality TV show, actually from the Jersey Shore. The front-end engineer couldn’t be further from that stereotype: “I like,” he says, “to read non-fiction, and I’m really into math books and technical stuff. But most of my reading at this point involves a screen, so it makes sense that I’m here. Reading a Medium post is one of the most enjoyable experiences on the web. There’s nothing to distract you.”
Also a resident of Jersey, Artem Titoulenko is a rising computer science senior at Rutgers, where he rows crew, competes in hackathons, and espouses the joys of Ruby in the CS student lounge. He’ll rhapsodize on command: “Ruby allows for nuance. There are so many ways to do the same thing. It enables creativity.”
A back-end engineer, Titoulenko has worked on Medium’s Dynamite DB layer and attacked vulnerabilities related to image serving. He laughs as he describes his obsession with programming: “Some people go to work and leave and don’t think about it. I can’t do that. I go home, and I think about programming. If I’m not near a computer, I write down things I should program the next day. It’s just really fun.” Titoulenko compares this intensity to crew, a sport “that romanticizes really pushing yourself. Moving in the boat with the people around you creates intense bonds.”
Saying good-bye
The interns have been moving in the boat together, so to speak, all summer. They’re a tight-knit group and can often be found clustered around the kitchen bar in the office or bantering on Twitter. One Tuesday evening, during Jank ‘n’ Drank, they dispatched en masse to the bathrooms to improve on the current problematic lock system—the Medium stalls now sport colored stickers that indicate when they’re occupied.
With the interns’ general high enthusiasm and particular desire to optimize daily office experiences, Medium has never been so bustling. As Grant Oladipo noted the other day, trailing the interns back to BART after a covert mid-day mission to San Francisco’s Mission District for Taqueria Cancun burritos,
“It’s going to be weird when they’re gone.”
