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From clean code to boba: Learnings from my internship at Coda

My experience in Coda’s engineering internship program.
PZ
Patrick Zhang
Hi, I’m Patrick. I study Computer Science at the University of Waterloo—and for the past 8 weeks, I’ve interned with Coda’s engineering team. When I discovered Coda through the
KP Fellowship program
⁠
, I realized this was exactly what I wish I had throughout my university career. Nothing made me more excited than to potentially work on it and help shape the future of docs, so of course, I applied.
⁠
PZ3.png
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Check out my Coda avatar!

What I worked on: A warning system for formulas

It didn’t take me long to realize that Coda’s engineering internship is focused on helping you grow and work on something you enjoy. The team asked about my personal interests and goals, and tailored the potential projects into something I was actually excited about. In my case, that topic was performance, since it was an area I never touched before.
I ended up working on a warning system for Coda’s formula language that potentially prevents makers from executing expensive formulas. And in the process, I learned how Coda’s formula language works and why it’s so powerful, plus a lot of about writing clean and reusable code.
Huge kudos to my mentor Matthew Tebbs for always being there for me and setting me on a path to succeed. Also to Teresa who was the PM for this project as she always kept us on track and made meetings fun. You can check out my project
here
⁠
!

What I thought about Coda’s culture

From the constant contact to the thorough interview guide, Coda’s amazing culture came through during the interview process. I could see the intention in the process and could tell that they wanted to hire people who truly believe in the product. Even Shishir (Coda’s CEO and co-founder) reached out offering to answer any questions I had!
One of my favorite things about Coda’s culture is that it is extremely open. In my first week of work, countless Codans reached out with a warm welcome and to schedule a call to get to know each other. Even as an intern, I was able to join whatever meeting interested me (including the board meeting), and I was encouraged to schedule meetings with whomever I wanted to get to know better or learn something from.
And although my internship was virtual, I still felt included in the team. Everyone is super eager to help and extremely fun to interact with. No one hesitated to jump into a Zoom call whenever I got stuck. There are open Slack channels for just about anything—I was part of the Starcraft channel where we played weekly games and the soccer channel where we would all watch and discuss the Euros together.
And Coda held many social events across the company, individual teams, and amongst the interns, where I got to meet and interact with people I typically wouldn’t work with. Some socials I attended were a magic performance, virtual escape room (where you got to control a real person through voice), DIY boba, and Taskmaster (all in the span of 8 weeks).

It’s been fun!

While short, the 8 weeks at Coda has been some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a company. I also grown so much as a software engineer, because there are just so many difficult problems that needs to be solved here. Coda is a small but mighty team, and I can’t wait to see what they accomplish in the coming years!

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