Looking back on my time as a Platform Engineering Intern at Socotra
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely mine and do not reflect the views and opinions of Socotra or any other organizations and individuals.
I. Exploring the world of venture-backed startups
In late June 2021, I started a software engineering internship at Socotra. I learned about Socotra through the 8VC Fellowship, an internship program where engineering students get placed into 8VC portfolio startups. I chose to intern here because I was excited by how the company is completely reimagining an industry (insurance) that’s been so underserved by technology. I also had never interned at a venture-backed startup before this, so I wanted to explore a different type of work environment where each person has much more leverage on the trajectory of the company. I was given quite a lot of responsibility as an intern because Socotra is growing so quickly. This posed quite a learning curve at first, but I grew a ton as an engineer and felt very well supported by the other engineers along the way. Below are the main lessons that I learned from my summer at Socotra.
II. Building a new service from the ground up
Configuration Studio (a Socotra product) is an application where insurance companies can design and deploy insurance products. Currently, Configuration Studio stores all files in the browser’s storage, which imposes a maximum storage limit. My project was to complete the core functionality for a new microservice that persists configuration files to Amazon S3 instead. This has three benefits: configuration files can be any size, are securely backed up, and be accessed across multiple devices. As a result, Configuration Studio now supports larger configurations for all of Socotra’s customers.
At first, I found the project to be fairly daunting. I read the product requirements document (PRD) and wasn’t sure where I would start. I learned a lot from breaking down the PRD into actionable tasks, prioritizing them, spreading them out over the duration of my internship, and identifying where I would need others’ help to remain unblocked. The process of doing so taught me how to approach completing a larger initiative that’s outside of my comfort zone.
III. A culture of growth, iteration, and improvement
At the time of writing, Socotra’s engineering team was around 30 people. This means that each engineer had a ton of ownership over their projects, and therefore a huge customer-facing impact. One part of the internship I really enjoyed was that the entire engineering organization had one daily standup together, so I could hear about what everyone else was working on and the progress they were making. I found this to be really motivating, and it was especially exciting to see the size of the standup grow in just three months as new engineers joined the company. I even had the opportunity to chat with many of the company executives, which gave me more appreciation for Socotra’s startup environment.
One of the engineering organization’s traditions is called Kudos. This is where engineers commend their colleagues during the engineering all-hands for going above and beyond to offer help or complete a project. It was awesome to see that people’s efforts were commended, as it motivates them to continue doing so. This tradition also made me feel compelled to go the extra mile in my own project. I also learned a lot from how the engineering organization approached improvement and iteration. All the engineers reflected on every sprint, project, production issue about what went well, what could be done better, and how to put those areas of improvement into practice. Documenting these takeaways was helpful as it laid the foundation to put any new feedback, ideas, and initiatives into practice.
The engineering organization prioritizes projects based on “business units.” This is a unit of measure that quantifies how much value a project will deliver to customers. As an example, a higher priority project may have ten business units, while a lower priority project may have four. This helps determine the order in which projects need to be completed. I learned a lot from this method of quantifying non-numeric entities, as it’s a useful framework for making decisions or prioritizing things.
IV. Conclusion
I had a great summer as a Socotra intern for more reasons than one. I had ownership of a meaningful project with customer-facing impact, worked with some incredibly talented engineers, and gained exposure to the engineering culture of a high-growth startup. The technical rigor of my project was challenging at times, but going out of my comfort zone as an engineer made this internship an even greater learning experience. This internship showed me that I value working in a fast-paced startup environment, having a clear understanding of the business impact of my work, and being in a culture of celebrating, reflecting, and improving. I’m very grateful for my time at Socotra, and I’m excited to see where my growth as an engineer (and my learnings about myself) will take me next in my career.
