I started my engineering internship late last summer when we were still located at Torstraße.
My first day began with a quick tour of the office space and a warm welcome lunch with the team. I was onboarded into countless slack channels, ran through tools and applications and skimmed through documentation and checklists. My onboarding was not only exciting but also overwhelming given the surge of information I was sinking into.
The few things that really stood out for me in my first week at Upvest were the warm team atmosphere, where you could just talk to anyone about anything, and the hands-on learning environment where with my team, I had already deployed a release.
My team takes care of the Payments domain of our Investment API. Typically, my day starts with our daily stand-up where we all share what we are working on, what the status of the project or task is, and what our plan for the day looks like. As I progress with my work through the day, I continue to collaborate with my team. Sometimes we talk over slack and sometimes with video sync-ups since we are mostly working remotely. These one-to-one sessions with my team are very insightful in allowing me to better grasp the complete requirement and expectation criteria for my tasks. They also help me in visualising the value, we as a team try to create for our stakeholders, be it internal or external.
Additionally, we have a mob pair programming session inside the team, which is a really cool opportunity to gain some hands-on experience in building our product. It gives valuable insight into learning the programming language we are building our API on, the tools that we use, and the relevant concepts that we need to understand to build our features. I find it especially interesting as at this time I get to peek into how my team approaches and solves problems. Throughout the week there are numerous opportunities to join sessions that can help broaden your knowledge about other topics running across other domains of the company.
The prospect of taking full ownership of a project from the ideation, design, planning, writing the software, and eventually release is challenging but it is also rewarding to see how these features we create together are bringing a direct impact on our product and enabling a better experience for our clients. These everyday challenges combined with the support from my team have helped me to grow a lot in these past months and I am excited about the challenges yet to come.