My Uncountable Internship: Niklas Vatn
Niklas Vatn is a student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden studying computer science. Niklas interned at Uncountable’s Munich office during the summer of 2021.
I couldn’t be more grateful for the time I spent as an intern at Uncountable and I hope this post can inspire somebody else to take a chance to work at Uncountable.
How I found the position
In late October, last year, I found Uncountable advertising at Kattis.com. I browsed their website and quickly concluded that this San Francisco startup looked like a great place to work. It felt like it was a bit out of my reach, especially since their only internship opportunity was in the US. At the time, I was applying for other jobs and had an updated resumé, so I figured that there is no harm in applying to Uncountable as well. To my surprise, I received an answer within 24 hours, and an initial interview was scheduled for the coming week. I was nervous, to say the least, and realizing I was about to talk to one of the founders did not help ease my apprehension. The rest of the interview process was quick and those interviews made it apparent how much they value their employees.
In December, I was offered a summer position as a full-stack intern at their Munich office. Eager to make a good impression when starting, I tried to make the most of this seemingly infinite wait by improving my React, Redux, and Python skills. I got some suggestions on good learning material from Jason (my boss) and tried to work my way through most of it. Reading books and watching tutorials can be helpful to get you going, but you won’t get far without practising the skills by creating something with them. I seized the opportunity to get involved in a development project at my student association at KTH. I worked together with a more senior student and he helped me to further deepen my React and Typescript knowledge.
The internship
When June arrived, I was permitted to travel to Munich but had to work the first few days from home due to the quarantine rules. I had imagined the first couple of days would be challenging, but I had clearly underestimated how different working in a large, unfamiliar codebase would be. I had never felt so underprepared before, and feelings of not being good enough plagued me for the first few weeks. My colleagues reassured me that this is something that they still grapple with and almost all software engineers have experienced this, especially on their first job. Realizing that I wasn’t bad helped me open up and I started asking more questions. And with the help of my team, it didn’t take long before I felt confident enough to produce new features on my own. My manager assigned me progressively harder tasks, and I had to take more responsibility for the design of features. Constantly being challenged was a cool experience, and I can’t remember that I have ever learned so much in such a short amount of time. Not only did I develop as a programmer, but also I learned general engineering skills and received plenty of career advice from my talented and generous colleagues.
The intensity of the workload was high, and I was expected to create at least one pull request for a new feature each day and, over time, this number increased. The features I developed varied drastically in scope and type. This diversity of tasks taught me multiple ways to handle changes of various sizes, and also introduced me to a diverse set of challenges. To name a few things I worked on: I implemented new types of statistics and ways of visualising them, created the first version of temperature tracking of locations in a lab, and added a feature to visualize DNA files in the platform (shoutout to Tim W. for improving on my draft).
But to finish it up, I want to mention that Uncountable is a company of highly skilled and helpful people, that values rapid action and progress, and (it might sound clichéd but I believe it to be true) makes that world a better place. Uncountable may not be the place for everyone, but if you like being challenged and aren’t afraid of hard work, I highly encourage you to talk to them. Thanks again for an amazing summer and I hope to come back sometime!
