My summer internship at HackerEarth has ended but the learning over past two months at HackerEarth has been more enriching than any education I have ever received. I feel lucky that I got an opportunity to work with one of the most talented teams that could be there in a startup. The journey of two months made the internship one of the best experiences that I’ve had so far. And if you’d ask me how it feels to intern at a startup, I’ll go like this.
Startup = Growth
True. I definitely feel that there has been some personal and professional growth that has come out of this internship. The skills that I have acquired here can only be gained in a startup environment with the help of awesome team members. While I was a software developer intern, I also gained insight into how startups work, how a tech company prioritizes their goals and quickly iterate over their product taking into account relevant factors like user experience etc. I also came to know about few more other things.
I am a programmer, I like to develop
With very little experience in python, the first task of writing a realtime server looked even more challenging and tough. Read more about it at
The Robust Realtime Server (Engineering blog). I also wrote unit tests for same which really eased the work of testing.
Every task/project I was assigned, was immediately relevant to HackerEarth. This meant that I couldn’t ignore and sit in the corner if I am stuck at some problem. I took a lot of help from
Praveen and
Vivek during continuous deployment project. Few things were really going over my head but it was fun working as a team and learning from each other.
The last two weeks of the internship were pretty fruitful too. I developed an application to show the status of various services/backends of HackerEarth.
To summarize, I learned and worked on following new technologies at HackerEarth – python, django, tornado, rabbitmq, fabric, celery, rethinkdb and aws.
Work hard, party harder
Fun at HackerEarth is not overruled by the monotonous routine of corporate life. Whenever we felt going out, we went. Sometimes we worked on weekends and took weekdays off for an outing. Wonderla was one such wonderful and memorable trip. Got a chance to try laser tag, go-karting and rock climbing.
It was a summer full of fun, laughter, and hard work. I enjoyed every day of it. Now I am back in college and I’m sure that it’s going be weird to attend classes. Going to miss the time that I’ve spent at HackerEarth.
Goodbye HackerEarth, and thank you for the farewell party!
