Guest post by Jian Xie, undergraduate student and LaunchDarkly intern.
Hello, my name is Jian and I'm one of the interns from ScriptEd for the summer of 2018. Although it was a short 5 weeks of being at LaunchDarkly, it has been an awesome experience.
If I could choose between being on a big engineering team or small engineering team, I would choose a small one. A small team gives you the opportunity to know your peers better and sharpen your relationship with them. This summer, being a part of a smaller team allowed me to finish my project faster and more efficiently.
My favorite part of this internship has been interacting with the people at LaunchDarkly. It has been super interesting knowing and understanding what they do to contribute and make the company a success. In terms of the engineering team, everybody is really interactive and welcoming, making LaunchDarkly a wonderful work environment.
During the first week of the internship, I felt like I wouldn't be able to contribute anything because it all seemed so different from what I learned before. I found it challenging to learn a new language as I worked, and have to figure out what each line of code does. But with help from the team and learning to be patient, I did get better as the weeks went by.
In the internship we worked on LaunchDarkly's internal administration dashboard, and started with many small stories. For example, in the first story we added a tooltip next to the account search box that explains how the search works. We also added warning signs in a few places to indicate potential issues.
Eventually we moved on to our main project: displaying server connection data from our API in a chart. This allows us to see how customers are using the product and if they are nearing their usage limits. This additional information is very valuable to our support, sales, and engineering teams.
This internship was more than just a learning opportunity, it was also a chance to make outside connections with different people. Being at LaunchDarkly helped me be more familiar with the kind of people I might work with in this industry. Also, these new connections could potentially lead to more opportunities as I start my career as a developer.
Having just finished my freshman year of college, doing an internship was quite exciting. It was a combination of a job and school, and an opportunity to explore the world outside of my comfort zone. Overall, it has been a fantastic experience with some challenging times, but I found that learning and communicating with others allowed me to overcome any obstacle. I highly recommend doing a summer internship!
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