Drawing The Owl, 12 Weeks At A Time: One CS Major’s Internship At Twilio

Drawing The Owl, 12 Weeks At A Time: One CS Major’s Internship At Twilio

This past summer, Katie took part in Twilio’s Software Engineering Internship Program, and spent 12 weeks writing, revising and pushing code while making time to adventure in San Francisco and beyond.

The internship experience at Twilio is designed to be immersive, but Katie really dove in. When she wasn’t learning about Twilio’s Data Warehousing, she was volunteering at local kitchens who are feeding the needy.

Check out a recap of Katie’s summer internship at Twilio below, and read her full extensive rundown of her experience here.

Drawing The Owl At Twilio

Week 1 Highlights

• Data about Data on Data –Data 101, aka the low down on what my team does and how. We maintain a data warehouse for reporting and data analysis. The warehouse is separate from production (a.k.a. the main Twilio application) databases to ensure we don’t break them. The warehouse is also optimized for reporting. In production you might want to get all the data for one user, such as in their account page. In analysis you might want to look at one piece of data for every user, such as last-login time.

• Customers, They’re Real, and We Talk To Them – Answered my first customer support ticket. All employees answer them to learn our product better : AWESOME. Made and demo-ed a Twilio app in 2 hours. All employees make an app: AWESOME.

Week 2 Highlights

• Python Databases For Production – I’m working on adding an object to our python library for interacting with our production databases. In unrelated news, my teammate Scott gave me a valuable tutorial on some python basics, like python decorators, which are a way to easily add the same feature/functionality to any method. For example you could use them with logging or timing.

Week 3 Highlights

• Pull Request Woes – Merged my pull request and it broke the master fork. Shit shit shit revert! What if I never achieve my dream of becoming a Senior Software Engineer? I didn’t test the python library changes before merging — I didn’t know how and planned to ask later, but forgot.

• Helping With Hackbright – Helped out with Hackbright academy visit to Twilio. Hackbright is a 10 week crash course in coding for women. I realized how much I have learned in the past two years — all the little stuff like grep and .bash_profile. I love how Twilio makes it easy to volunteer. It was incredibly powerful to be in a room of mostly female coders. The space changes. Also I connected one of the women with a recruiter! Good luck to her.

• After A Hard Day’s Work, Comes Play – Company baseball outing! Everyone here is really friendly.