Summer Engagement opportunity at Redbubble
I started working on the costing project for Redbubble on June 15, 2020, three months after the pandemic has been officially declared. The world just started adjusting to remote work life, and I was fortunate to kick off remote work with Redbubble. I and my colleagues from Make School hopped in Google meets to have our first meeting with our supervisor. We discussed Front end sketch, ERD design, and an overview of the project we will be working on. We also covered who our users would be when we would potentially meet them and ask them for user experience feedback, Who would be responsible for a feature, what would our role look like, we discussed key aspects that will affect our overall team structure.
The first week of my internship at Redbubble went well. The team had a meeting collectively. We discussed what we will be building in the next months and what our milestones will be. We went over the ERD diagram and Frontend sketches and discussed what is possible in the given time frame. I did my own version of ERD, picked a framework I would like to work with, communicate what the code will look like with PM and FE developer. Our team met with vendor managers and presented the front end sketches as well as ERD for DB. We got feedback from the vendor managers on how they will be using our product.
Through the second and third week, I started facing a time management challenge due to my busy class schedule. I and my mentor are meeting once every two weeks to discuss progress and milestones. Together with my team, I was able to integrate the backend with the frontend, send and receive data within the two applications locally. We presented our MMVP to vendor managers, did a UX test with them, and got valuable feedback on how the app can be improved to solve some problems.
Time management was the biggest constraint I faced throughout the engagement opportunity, especially during this time because coding and figuring out the best way to implement a feature might end up taking more time.
During my time at Redbubble, I and my team had the privilege of spending an hour with a Redbubble engineer from different teams/roles. We had a session with a Data Scientist, Backend Engineer, Frontend Engineer, and Recruiter. It was like the internship experience interns say they have during their internship. The engineers would dive deep into their work and talk about why what they do matters to the companey.
I have learned a great deal on how to communicate with my team, my mentor, and communicate my ideas. I am thankful for the opportunity and the time that my supervisor provided.
