Internship Experience with WalmartLabs, Reston, VA, USA

Published in

Walmart Global Tech Blog

5 min readAug 15, 2019

Working with WalmartLabs is one of the best experiences I have ever had. It’s like working at the startup, where everyone is super talented and humble. Starting from the interview process to the last day of the internship everything is well-planned. We wrote around 30,000 lines of code, gained a lot of knowledge about cloud deployments, best practices for production-level code, code reviews, and taking responsibility. It’s not just about code, we enjoyed a lot during this internship. Check out things below to know more.

Interview Process, Offer Letter
1st Week — ShareHolders, Bentonville
Team and Project Details
Discovery Phase, Agile Management
Implementation Phase
Tech Stack
Demos
Performance Reports
Summer Picnic, Paint and Sip, LaserTag, Journey to Awesome

Interview Process

WalmartLabs interview process is way different than the rest of the tech companies. I had 3 rounds in total. Most of the interviews will be on Fridays since it is flexible for senior software engineers. The whole process took 1 month. The interview process was different from person to person.

Round 1 (1 hour)– My interviewer is very friendly and asked me to solve two scenario-based questions using Algorithms and Data Structures.

After round 1, I got an email with the project details to work on in a week. This project is somewhat tricky. In order to solve this project you need to think out of the box. I solved this project using Operating Systems algorithm. We needed to write a production-level code with clear documentation and testing.

Round 2 (1 hour)- During this round, you need to explain the project you worked on and you need to explain why you solved this problem using a particular algorithm?. The interviewer also asked me to solve a few more edge cases and he asked me how I can change my algorithm to solve those edge cases.

Round 3(Manager Round): In this round, the interviewer asked me about my goals, and technology which I am interested in.

Then … BOOM!

1st week — Shareholders Meeting, Bentonville

This is the best week of the whole internship, Walmart funds all the interns for this trip. As an East Coast intern, I flew to Bentonville on June 5th. We had 2 parties followed by shareholders meeting.

Team and Project Details

My project is based upon creating a responsive web application to help the Asset Protection team. This project involves 4 main components:

Inspect — Interface for overnight managers to inspect powered lifting equipments daily at the stores.
Review — Interface for shift managers to review the submitted inspections.
Audit — Interface for the auditors to generate compliance reports about how the store is performing.
Reports — Dashboard for Home Office to know how all the stores and regions are performing and identify training opportunities.

I worked with the Asset Protection Team with two more interns, it’s a really good team to work with. My manager guided us well to build a minimum viable product in 10 weeks with the help of two senior software engineers who have many years of experience in both UI and backend.

Discovery Phase, Agile Management

Starting from June 10th till June 21st we had a great time discovering the project requirements by actually visiting the Walmart SuperCenter in Tyson’s Corner. We interacted with our manager and product owner to define the scope and the team and conduct backlog grooming & prioritization.
During this phase, we were told to brainstorm the way we want to develop the Service architecture. Senior software engineers helped us to remove complexity in our architecture.

WalmartLabs follows the Agile methodology. We had standup meetings every day, where we discussed what we have worked on and what we are going to work on. We used JIRA for sprint planning and the sprint duration is two weeks. Every week I had a 1:1 meeting with my manager.

Implementation Phase

I worked on the backend during the initial days of the internship. I created REST APIs using Java Spring Boot with appropriate documentation and testing. Later, I worked on React JS. We used Plotly and Nivo to create dashboards using React JS. We deployed both backend and frontend components in the staging cloud.

Tech Stack

Java Spring Boot: https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot
React: https://reactjs.org
React-Redux:https://redux.js.org/basics/usage-with-react
Axios: https://github.com/axios/axios
Material UI: https://material-ui.com
OneOps: http://oneops.com
Liquibase: https://www.liquibase.org
Jenkins: https://jenkins.io
Redux-Persist: https://github.com/rt2zz/redux-persist
JUnit4: https://junit.org/junit4/
Mockito: https://site.mockito.org
Plotly: https://plot.ly/javascript/react/
Nivo: https://github.com/plouc/nivo

Demos

Every sprint, we showed our progress to our product owner. Apart from those demos we had 5 main demos in total.

Mid-point Demo — Demo to the product owner
Store Demo —Demo to the store manager Walmart, Tysons Corner
Lightning Talk Demo — Demo to Fiona Tan, SVP Engineering, Customer Technology Walmart US & eCommerce and to other WalmartLabs associates
Interns Demo Day — Demo and deeper dive with the WalmartLabs Associates along with our fellow interns
Final Demo — Demo to the product owner, other business stakeholders and our director

Performance Reviews

Performance reviews helped me to know where I stand in the internship and it also helped me to know the areas in which I need to focus and improve as well as the areas in which I am doing great. During this internship, I received two performance reports: the Mid-point Performance Review and the End of Summer Performance Review.