DEV Community: Mayank S Jha

4 things I learned from my internship that helped me grow

Mayank S Jha — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 17:37:03 +0000

Over the summer I had the wonderful opportunity to work as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon. As an international student, getting to work at a prestigious company from FAANG was definitely a goal I never thought I would be able to reach.

I was extremely nervous but also excited as I did not know what to expect. This was my first internship ever so it was also the first time I was going to be in a professional environment. College is great and all, but it never gives you the true experience of a working environment. We have all been there to some extent. A job/internship is very different from your experience at college or high-school.

In my experience, I have always tried to take something away from a situation, sometimes the hard way. So, at the end of my internship, I compiled a list of the most important lessons I learned over the summer. I’d like to share them with you.

Start strong, end strong
Feedback is everything
You are responsible for your own career
Have fun

Start Strong, End Strong

Consistency is the name of the game. This a saying that is passed around as a lesson for almost anything in life. The reality is that it is harder than it sounds.

Consistency, in my opinion, is an umbrella term.

Perseverance — One of the single greatest qualities we can have as humans, is perseverance. To face the odds no matter what, and continue to put in the effort to achieve something. Keep at it, and you will make progress to be proud of. Sure, some ideas may still crash and burn but you walk away with so much more. Thomas Edison said, “I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work.”

Dive Deep — When going up against herculean tasks, you need to be prepared. Break your tasks into smaller components. Go into the storm of your tasks ready. Check your equipment and gear ( tools you need ), check the map ( How will you complete this task? / What are you looking for? ), and READ THE F****** MANUAL.

Consistency — Remember that new year’s resolution that died down after school reopened or was it during that deadline week? Join the club. It’s easy to be on top of your game at the start of something but that same energy, dedication dies down after a while. Be aware of this mistake as I myself have fallen victim more than I’d like to admit.

hm… I should change the title…“Start Strong, End Stronger”

Feedback is Everything

This is definitely an important one. Feedback is what drives us to be better at whatever we do. It is the fundamental on which the idea of competition exists. Competition in turn yields better output.

So, where is the catch?

Feedback is never nonverbal. It is a bias to think that no feedback means everything is a-okay. Feedback is your own responsibility to make sure that you receive it.

Don’t take feedback personally. Seek constructive criticism and accept it. I would sometimes make the mistake of feeling like I’m worthless because someone said, “This is wrong, we went over this.” When in reality, I was being guided to watch out for silly mistakes that can happen to anyone.

You are responsible for your own career

My first manager said, “You are responsible for your own career.” and the words have stuck with me ever since. I have thought long and hard about this one.

Focus on why you are doing what are you are doing. Take a minute to think about it. What is the outcome?

When working together, trust others, and make sure others can trust you. We should be able to deliver results blindly without going back and forth for cleanups. It gets better over time as we learn to catch and rectify ourselves if something goes wrong.

Have fun

This one is simple…

Have fun. Take care of your health and well being and reach out when you need assistance. Over the summer, I was cooped up in my university dorm for 3 months working 8 hours a day remotely. So, believe me when I say that I wish I had done something more to keep my well being intact.

You simply cannot perform at the same level as you would when you are at your best mentally, physically, emotionally and any other “-allys” you can think of.

When I try to think about what has changed since my summer, I feel that I am definitely a more confident person. I know that when I wake up tomorrow, I will follow these learnings as not just a handbook for the “office life” but also as a form of self-discipline.

Why? Because f*** it that’s why. But also, because I never said that these learnings helped me grow as a professional. I said that these learnings helped me grow. Period.

Building CollegeHub

Mayank S Jha — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 15:15:55 +0000

Backstory

When I was a freshman, I had no experience with building projects, let alone websites. I learned whatever I could from my courses but never knew how to apply them to a project from start to finish. Many documentations, Udemy courses, frustrating nights and rage quits later, I felt comfortable in being able to manifest an idea into a real product. Be it a website, or just a simple script that did something cool like log in to my university website every time I access it.

One such project was a simple personal website. I saw many seniors have one of their own which they used as their ‘personal brand’. More often than not, it was as simple as finding or building a simple template in HTML and CSS, putting in all your information, and publishing it. Almost every personal website was built this way.

When the time came for me to build mine and showcase my stuff I also followed the same routine. I used GitHub’s static website hosting to publish it and I was ready to go.

You can still see it here

But, I was not satisfied. I was happy with the way it looked, but I felt that I am more than just HTML and CSS. I am Fullstack. So I began working on a concept where I can add, remove, and update information on my website dynamically. I used Django and Python to come up with a CRUD application that dynamically handles my portfolio. That became my official website and my ‘personal brand’.

You can check it out here!

(Re)Birth

When I showed this to my friends, they were impressed with the idea. They all wanted to make one like mine but my code was a bit too hard-coded for my own needs. So, we came up with a new idea.

What if we took this dynamic portfolio generator, and abstracted it out for anyone. Our niche was targeting college students like ourselves who can easily build a beautiful portfolio in minutes.

“So… Linkedin ?”

Well, yes but technically no. We wanted to add a customizable touch to the idea of building out your college portfolio. Thus, CollegeHub was born.

But why the name, CollegeHub. What’s so “hub-by” about it? We wanted CollegeHub to be more than just a glorified resume.

Here is a glimpse at my profile on CollegeHub.

So, what else do we offer?

CollegeHub comes with fast, easy-to-access features that will make your site stand out. These features make CollegeHub a one-stop-shop to create, customize, and share your portfolio easily. College students can sign up, and choose from a range of templates to match their style and get up and running without hassles.

Through CollegeHub, students can also manage their events and schedules. Through the event planner feature, they can create new events, with the feature of inviting others as well. Students also have access to a personal blog which they can use as part of their portfolio. Since this website is for any college student, there should be no limits as to what they’d like to showcase.

What next?

We demoed our website at University at Buffalo’s CSE Demo Day. Many judges and visitors were impressed by the idea and we received positive feedback. We also received a lot of suggestions which we noted down as well. We placed 2nd amongst 25-30 other capstone projects from UB.

In the future, we want to roll out our website to students at UB and other universities. We plan to leverage multiple platforms to advertise and promote our website. This could be through Linkedin, jumpstart, University email lists, Reddit, etc.

As far as the dev team goes, we want to continually update and maintain the website with more features to enrich the user experience. We plan to roll out templates to choose from, categorizing styles as we expand. We hope to turn the event planner into a more robust feature that offers automatic event management, event conflict notifications, recurring schedules, and calendar views. We also want to integrate existing social applications like Linkedin to build the profile.

Another interesting feature on our roadmap is a curated job-board that focuses on New Grad roles and internships, further justifying the name of our product, CollegeHub.

My teammates, Christopher Perez, Sauptik Saha, Rayan Ray, Tamaghan Maurya, and I are very excited about the future of CollegeHub.

Check out CollegeHub today, and leave us feedback at
teamcollegehub@gmail.com

Amazon 2020 Internship, Week 1

Mayank S Jha — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 12:02:00 +0000

A lot changed this year. That too is probably an understatement. One of my goals through this blog article is to document my experience at Amazon as an intern this year.

I have been extremely lucky to have worked for Amazon and grow as a software engineering intern.

Hopefully, readers out there may learn a bit more about my experience, as I reflect on my own.

I also aim to get better at writing so, here is to many more articles that I hope you enjoy.

Change of plans

I received my offer pre-COVID and I was immediately on-board. As an international student, getting the opportunity to grow, learn, and work at a FAANG company was almost anyone’s goal. My work location was Seattle, Washington and everyone told me the summers are amazing. I was to start on the 26th of May, 2020.

I called up my best friend, who also received an internship offer in Seattle.

“Hey, we NEED to find an apartment together.”

All sorts of plans were made, and I was ready, just aching for the semester to end so I can fly out to the west coast.

When the pandemic started, I was unsure about what was going to happen. Everything went online at school, people started working from home, everyone was under self-quarantine. It was confusing as much as it was scary. I have massive respect for the healthcare workers, officials, and everyone who worked tireless days and nights to contain and treat the pandemic.

The weeks leading up to the internship were nerve-wracking. As the economy took a hit, companies were rescinding or delaying internship offers. It created a cloud of confusion and uncertainty. Alas, Amazon notified their interns that they will proceed virtually this summer.

I had no idea what to expect.

“Pre-season”

As we got closer to the starting date, Amazon did their absolute best to make the onboarding process smooth and easy for everyone. My first real interaction was an FAQ session where the Amazon student program team clarified questions and doubts about the virtual internship. My favorite question during that meeting was,

“What about the swag ?”

Love it. Moving on.

Admittedly, the WFH environment did ease up a few things. I did not have to struggle to find a new apartment and I didn’t have to worry about putting my items in storage back in Buffalo either.

Over the next few weeks, I was introduced to my manager and I was given brief details about my team, fellow interns, and the project I would be doing over the summer. I received my IT equipment the weekend before we started and I was blown away by the setup.

Day 1 was closer than ever and it was time to begin.

Day 1.

The first thing we were told when we started was, “It’s always Day 1”.

My first day at work was spent logging into my work laptop and receiving the details of my NHO (New Hire Orientation). Amazon’s organized process took me through a series of setups i.e email, meetings, and other onboarding tools.

By late afternoon, I was ready with everything and ready to meet the team for my first stand-up. My manager sent out the meeting link and introduced me to my mentor as well as the rest of the team. They spent a while introducing themselves, talking a bit about what they do, their background, and their interests. It was refreshing to be amongst a group of talented engineers with unique stories of their own, coming together and working as one team. Two of my teammates introduced me to their cats as well. No complaints there.

This was my first ever internship, so every little detail about the industry was fascinating to see. I saw what a typical stand-up looks like -- How a team communicates and collaborates on different challenges. It was scary at first, but it became almost second nature as the weeks went on.

I spoke to my mentor afterward and learned more about the project as he welcomed me to the team and company.

Settling in

The next few days involved going through the various onboarding activities within Amazon. Setting up my work environment, Coding boot camps, 1:1 meetings, AWS training, SDE training, and other orientation meetings.

Additionally, I spent most hours reading about multiple AWS services that I was expected to use. This involved internal tools, documentation, examples, etc. This presented an excellent opportunity to reach out to and interact with engineers in my team as well as other teams. It’s important to remember that they would be the first line of defense against any blockers one can face during the internship.

Takeaways

Even though things didn’t go as planned, Amazon is a huge place, so there is always more than enough to see and do as part of the company. Virtual environments can be tricky when starting at a new place and it can be very easy to “become a stranger.” Never worry, for every day is a new day, a fresh start. Always remember, it’s always Day 1.