akrish

I just finished my summer internship at Tellme yesterday, and it was an amazing experience. Not only did I have a really fun time working there, but I definitely learned a lot and I also got to see the infrastructure of a moderately sized company. I was a applications developer intern, so I ended up doing a lot of coding, but everything I did there was very different from any of the coding projects I’ve worked on for fun or for school. A lot of the differences were essential to running the company, but some of them made things run a lot slower. Most of them however, were really good programming practices that I’m beginning to pick up and notice in my own coding. Here’s some of the things that I learned from my projects, the employees, and of course, my fellow interns:

1. Consistent Coding Style For the most part, code is pretty hard to read. You probably know that if you’ve ever wanted to add to something you wrote a couple of months ago, and then figured it’d be easier for you to start from scratch than to decipher your code and augment it. When working on bigger projects though, it’s a huge waste of time to start over, so you need to make your code as readable as possible. It’s even more important on team projects when other people will be reading your code and using it or adding to it. On these projects, it’s essential to have a consistent and defined coding style that’s used by all members of the team.

One of my projects at Tellme involved abstracting some preexisting code, so naturally I had to read through all of it. There was one file, that was about 2500 lines long, incredibly dense, and very unintelligible.

It took me about a two full days to go through this one file and figure out what was going on, and this was largely because the coding style sucked. Anyway to make a long story short, having a consistent coding style really adds to the productivity of a team, especially on large projects.

2. If it’s not tested, it’s broken I was amazed at the level of testing that went on at Tellme. Even things like content changes to their corporate website would be reviewed by a pair of developers and then by a QA engineer. It was a standard practice to review these minor changes on four or five different browsers, which I found to be a bit excessive, but also very thorough. It was a marked difference from the level of testing that goes into my own projects. On my projects, I used to just test until it works a couple of times, but after seeing how production-grade software is tested, I’ve started to write testing suites and actually test my projects.

3. Production Quality As I spent time at Tellme working on their projects, I realized that everything I’ve ever coded hasn’t been suitable for production at all. In fact a lot of what I do is take an idea to proof of concept, and then drop it. I never spend time on exception handling, error checking, parameter validation, documentation, or even optimization, but all of these are essential to making software actually usable. It’s interesting to see that programmers end up spending most of their time on these things, rather than the things that I end up doing. They code a lot, but very few of them are actually designing new things. A lot of the time they work on making things robust, and actually usable.

4. Bug Fixing Most of working on a development team is spent fixing bugs. It’s something I don’t really look forward to when I think about getting a job. I’d much rather be actually working on something new and innovative than fixing bugs for a career. Pretty much the first half of my internship was fixing bugs on Tellme’s website, and that was actually really boring. Granted it was important and needed to be done, but the work wasn’t very intellectually stimulating at all. I guess it goes with making production quality software, but it’s pretty monotonous to be fixing bugs all day.

Speaking of bug fixes, the other interesting thing I noticed was that Tellme would release software with bugs in it all of the time. Apparently it’s a pretty common practice for companies to do this so that they can meet their deadlines. It makes sense to me that they need to release software by a given date, so they purposely don’t address some bugs, but it’s also very odd for me, because whenever I see a bug in my software, I immediately fix it. I guess that’s one of the differences between a side project that you work on in your free time, and a project that you work on for a company.

5. Programming Overhead This is one of the things that makes me not really want to work for anything but a startup, but the developers at Tellme are actually only writing code for maybe 25% of the time they’re working. So much time is spent communicating, maintaining servers, interacting with huge code bases, and all sorts of other stuff, that they don’t actually spend that much time coding. A lot of what they do is necessary: people need to communicate on team projects, servers need to be maintained, and when you have a lot of code, you need to have some way to store it (i.e. version control systems like csv or svn). These just aren’t thing’s I really want to be doing for a career, at least not right now. I want to spend my time designing innovative technologies, and writing really cool software, rather than on maintenance. Seeing this at Tellme (which is already a pretty small company) made me really want to work for a start-up, where I wouldn’t have to waste some much time on overhead.

There definitely are more things, which is why I’ve titled this part 1, but I’m having some serious writer’s block right now, so I’ll get to the other stuff later. I also plan to write about the more general lessons (not related to programming) that I learned at Tellme. A lot of the things I didn’t like, aren’t really specific to Tellme, but more are causes of working at a company with a lot of people. These are all things that are essential to company infrastructure, but annoying to deal with as a developer. I’m sure I’ll get used to all of these things when I actually get a job, but as a student, they’re things that make me not really want to get a real job. Overall though, I really enjoyed my time at Tellme, and it was an amazing learning experience. I highly recommend getting an internship, and I’d be thrilled to get another one next summer.