My 2019 Summer Internship at Hackerrank Bangalore
- 4 minsI had the opportunity to intern at Hackerrank, Bangalore during the summer of 2019 and in this blog I’d like to tell you about my experience ! For those of you who haven’t heard about Hackerrank, it is the market–leading technical inteview platform to identify and hire developers with the right skills. It also has a community website where you can practice problems, solve challenges and become a better developer. It has offices in Mountain View, London and Bengaluru :)
Applying to Hackerrank
I heard about the internship opening from a friend and applied through their careers page. They hire two kinds of interns, Technical Content Engineers(TCE) and Software Engineering(SWE) Interns. The TCEs are responsible for curating and making problems on algorithms, data structures etc for hackerrank while the SWEs work on DevOps, Back-end, Front-end etc. I applied for an SWE position and had an interview scheduled with the CTO of hackerrank Harishankaran Karunanidhi. After the interview, he said they would get back to me and within a week I had an offer from Hackerrank. I was really excited to join !
The internship and the work culture
The internship started sometime in May and we were given an introductory session where all the interns set up their laptops and finished some formalities. The next day we were assigned tasks and mentors. We were also told and go to interact with the Sales team so we would get to know about how the sales works. This was really fun because as developers we often do not understand how customers buy our software or how the whole marketing and sales department works ! The best thing about hackerrank is that there is no hierarchy, we never felt like interns, we were included in every event, discussion and could give our views and opinions freely. Moreover, we had a weekly meeting with Hari where we explained whatever work we did during that week to him AND also to all the other interns. This was really good as we could learn by listening to other interns as well. During the course of the internship, all the interns(10 of us) were put up in a hotel nearby the office. This helped us to foster great friendships and we helped each other grow technically by having many intellectual discussions . You can check out all the interns here.
What I learnt during my internship
The main tech stack of hackerrank is ruby on rails and react. I had already worked on ruby on rails in my previous internship, so I got the opportunity to work on React and Redux. My mentor was Aakansha Doshi, who is a front-end developer. I learnt so much from her, from the basics to best practices, finding test-cases etc. She also gave me feedback at the end of the internship which I am grateful for. I also worked with Shiv Deepak from the Mountain View office. I worked on an interesting DevOps related task with him. This was also a good experience as I had never worked on DevOps before nor had any idea about it. Apart from the technical learning, I also learnt about stand-ups,team work, how to communicate effectively, test driven development, to not be scared to ask for help but also ask for help only when we have tried enough.
Fun times…
Apart from work, we also had a lot of fun in the office. The office has a foosball table, table tennis room as well as XBox. We would play foosball whenever we wanted to take a break, infact on weekends we would come to office just to play ! The office also has a very well stocked pantry :P
Moreover, Hackerrank has tied up with KidsWhoKode and the office of HackerRank in Koramangala, Bengaluru is transformed into a classroom every friday. Underprivileged students visit to learn to code and are taught by the employees of this tech company. The interns volunteered and took turns to teach the children. Also,the full-time employees go out of their way to teach the children !
Amazing summer came to an end…
All good things must come to an end and so did this internship. I learnt a lot and made great friendships. I would like to thank everyone at Hackerrank for making this one of the best summers of my life ! I would like to thank Ishani, Nalini and Kenny from the HR team for taking great care of us , and Hari, Aakansha, Shiv and so many others for the amazing technical experience ! 😄
P.S — Highly recommend students to apply for an internship. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions :)
[This blog post was originally published on Medium]
