Hendrike Peetz of the COMMIT/ Infiniti Project recently came back from a 4.5 month placement with large industrial lab Google. She wrote the following brief reflection:
Google Zurich
This winter, I did a 4.5 month internship at Google Zurich. While I was quite sceptical at the beginning, it turned out to be a valuable experience. Let me explain why.
I have a purely academic background. I learnt programming out of pure necessity, barely following any standard Computer Science courses. Programming was a tool for all the algorithms I had flowing around in my head. I never even worked on any programming tasks outside of University. When I got accepted as an intern at Google I was surprised, but equally terrified. Writing down small algorithms in an interview or for my thesis use is one thing — but working on critical software impacting millions of users?
Site Reliability Engineer
In fact, I even ended up doing my internship as a Site Reliability Engineer. Even though interns don’t get to use critical data and don’t have access to critical systems, I got a glimpse into how to design systems to make them withstand outages etc. But I also had to code. And, as no code is allowed to enter the codebase without passing by at least a second pair of eyes, I received a lot of comments and learnt a lot. While I was coding, I also realized how much fun and how social coding like this can be. I learnt that small mistakes are normal and that even with a purely academic background, all you need to be is flexible and willing to admit your mistakes. I realised that approaching “real problems” with an academic approach does solve them, and that it is really a lot of fun creating solutions for actual large-scale industry problems.
Writing cleaner and better code
What I took home from the internship, were strategies to write cleaner and better code, an awareness and understanding of huge amounts of data, and a refreshed mind to finish my thesis.
INFINITI (Information retrieval for information services)
Ook dit is een COMMIT/project.