SnapComms Testimony: Summer of Tech

First times are always terrifying – interviews and jobs exceptionally so. I remember the first day of my internship, sitting in the middle of an office with a laptop. All I could think about was living up to expectations. I was so nervous my hands were shaking as I was surrounded by strangers discussing and going about their jobs. It seems so long ago now that I’ve learned so much about the technology, product, people and life in a medium-sized SaaS company.After the initial setup of our development environments, our intern group of four started our first week with short group sessions with our two mentors, Dan and Rookie. These short sessions were quick introductions on the flow of the product and how certain things linked together and interacted with each other. It was quite daunting hearing all these things, wondering if I would be able to remember them all.About halfway through our first week we were assigned tasks to complete for the product. Although they were moderately simple tasks, it took us several hours to complete them as none of the interns had any clue of what was going on. With some guidance from our mentors, we figured out how to solve our first tasks and eventually got our pull requests merged into the develop branch for the first time.It was an amazing feeling – less than a week into our internships and we had all made changes to the SnapComms product. At our internship we weren’t given a side project to work on or anything like that – we were thrown right into the main product and were able to make a difference for customers using our software.After a couple of weeks, I learned a vital piece of information – perhaps the most important piece of information during my entire internship. My boss is not only incredibly knowledgeable, he’s also hilarious (and has an uncanny knack for remembering JavaScript object properties). It made me feel a lot more comfortable going to him when I was out of ideas, didn’t know how to approach a problem or didn’t understand something in the code. He would sit down with me and point out things that might help, give me a little bit of advice or show me how to write a particular snippet of code to solve things.This is only the development side of my internship. There were many other things that made it so much easier to feel comfortable in the company. Casual dress code everyday (no need to change wardrobe), cake time nearly every week, payday lunches with a cross section of people from the office, super chill Friday drinks with everyone, a social club that has external outings about once or twice a month and fully funded ‘goal’ reward office outings.Fast forward nearly 9 months and I’ve touched on nearly every part of the product, working with Angular, TypeScript/JavaScript, Less/CSS, C#/.NET, SQL, Objective C, PowerShell, Android and iOS app development, Mac app development and a bit of Windows app development. I’ve worked on major features of the product and become an extremely valued member of the dev team that can work on just about any task for any platform.I’ve learnt an unbelievable amount through my internship and working full time at SnapComms. It’s great having a boss/mentor who doesn’t even feel like a boss, just someone to make jokes with and to be a little nosey and watch how he’s developing. Accepting a job offer here was probably the best thing I’ve ever done.