Grace Lu

June 12, 2016: Day one as a CodeHS intern

 

This is my workspace

This is my workspace

Hey everybody,

Sorry for the late update! It’s been a hectic first week so far; from now on, I’ll be updating more regularly about my work and my experience every Wednesday and every Saturday.
Nonetheless, I started work on Monday, which has been great so far. I wake up each morning at 8AM and then take a 20 minute bus commute to my office in South of Market (or commonly known as SoMa).

On the first day, I wandered in and one of the programmers –a WashU alum!– immediately took me upstairs to my station where my desk was set up. I was provided with my own work laptop (a MacBook Pro, which I’m still trying to figure out as I’m a Windows person), a CodeHS t-shirt, a card, and a couple of raffle tickets which were my stupid questions tickets. They give the interns these tickets to encourage us to ask questions since we’ll have plenty of them this summer. Once both of the CodeHS CEOs were done taking care of things for the morning, they immediately took me into an office room and gave me a brief presentation on the company.

Grace blog - workspace

This is the bottom floor of our office! We have lunch and weekly meetings at this table

During that time, I learned that every person on the CodeHS team had to take me out for coffee and that I would get free lunch every day! They also showed me the different ways they plan their schedules and track their work: the company uses asana.com, slack, and features on their website to make sure that everyone’s always accomplishing what they’ve planned for the week. My first week was simply going through the engineering bootcamp, where I familiarized myself with the technologies I would be working with (Django, Javascript, AngularJS, Git, etc.), my local development environment, and the code style guides that the team uses.

I felt very comfortable working at this startup since everybody is around my age (late 20s-early 30s max), and the team comprised of around 15 people total. We would regularly go out and grab some coffee together and bond over activities like weekly recess: every Wednesday we would pick a random activity, and this week we played Scattergories.
One of my coworkers also hosted a women of color in tech meetup so I got to meet a lot of women and learn about their experiences as a woman of color in this city. It was very eye-opening to hear about their thoughts, and I had a lot of people give me advice about what to do after college and the places I should go to in the city. I really love working here and am excited to see what else I’ll be experiencing and working on during the summer!