<commit_before>---
layout: post
title:  "Thanks Hearsay"
date:   2015-09-07 11:13:00
categories: Internship
---

This past summer I worked as a software engineering intern at Hearsay Social, a medium sized saas startup based in San Francisco. I had an awesome mentor - [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/jasonscheirer); yes I'm sure they did that on purpose.

![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/hearsay.jpg)

Specifically I worked on the site reliability engineering team, responsible for maintaining the stability of the entire platform. We managed various systems from the actual servers to databases and everything in between to make sure that the site was always up and that others could easily add functionality to our platform.

What I focused on during my time at Hearsay was mainly on improving the onboarding process. My goal was to improve the login and invite systems in order to make user onboarding for our new customers as seamless as possible. Establishing an excellent onboarding system for getting first time users onto the Hearsay site was extremely important in establishing a strong base for our customer service. At Hearsay, having customers as our first priority is one of our three company wide virtues.

![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/mentor.jpg)

Working at Hearsay was a great educational experience. Never having really worked with Python or Javascript before, I was thrown into the world of Django and Backbone. The number of things I learned this summer seem endless, from Jinja2 templating to creating new MySQL database tables, managing cross origin server requests, and writing REST APIs, the list goes on and on. Learning all of these new technologies required a lot of experimentation, self learning, and obviously Googling... a developer's best tool, but I could not have learned at the pace I did without the support of my team and the entire engineering department. Hearsay engineers were extremely friendly and approachable. I literally felt like I could easily ask anyone a question (They might have seemed too friendly because I might have asked a BIT too many). With great mentorship, I felt like I could have many productive discussions about the best way to design a new feature or a more concise way to write a piece of code. At an internship great mentorship is especially important because of the short time you are at the company. You are expected to quickly contribute, and with so much to learn, it is inherently very difficult. The friendly team made this transition much easier and made me a much more productive engineer.

 Although my main projects this summer were regarding user onboarding, I worked on a wide variety of projects, from improving our internal deployment systems to creating APIs for our newest product - [Sites](http://hearsaysocial.com/product/hearsay-sites/). I really felt like this summer I had a lot of freedom to define what I wanted to work on. Whenever projects finished up, I would ask other engineers for ideas on things to work on and even talked to our customer success teams to see if there were any pain points that they desperately needed to address. I even created my own small changes whenever I thought there was room for improvement within a specific system. Towards the end of the summer, I was even getting tagged in questions related about onboarding - a source of great pride as I felt like I truly could take ownership over the work I contributed during my summer. I felt that I grew a great amount over such a short amount of time. How roles have switched from the individual that was asking questions to the individual that was answering the questions. It was a great feeling to help the other engineers who have provided me so much guidance over the summer as well.

 Outside of the enomorous wealth of knowledge I feel like I could learn from other people at Hearsay, I really appreciated the company culture. From day 1 people were extremely friendly and enthusiastic to get to know you. There were numerous bonding moments with other employees, from waving hi to (and constantly bothering) our friendly receptionist every morning, to the countless coffee trips to the Philz coffee next door, and our fun company events 100 feet away at AT&T park. I cherish the friendships I was able to make this summer, not just within the engineering team, but company wide. The people at Hearsay were undoubtable the best part of my experience. The people at any company really make or break the experience, and this summer at Hearsay was made extremely special because of the great people there.

 ![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/interns.jpg)<commit_msg>Update Hearsay blog post with shoutouts<commit_after>---
layout: post
title:  "Thanks Hearsay"
date:   2015-09-07 11:13:00
categories: Internship
---

This past summer I worked as a software engineering intern at Hearsay Social, a medium sized saas startup based in San Francisco. I had an awesome mentor - [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/jasonscheirer); yes I'm sure they did that on purpose.

![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/hearsay.jpg)

Specifically I worked on the site reliability engineering team, responsible for maintaining the stability of the entire platform. We managed various systems from the actual servers to databases and everything in between to make sure that the site was always up and that others could easily add functionality to our platform.

What I focused on during my time at Hearsay was mainly on improving the onboarding process. My goal was to improve the login and invite systems in order to make user onboarding for our new customers as seamless as possible. Establishing an excellent onboarding system for getting first time users onto the Hearsay site was extremely important in establishing a strong base for our customer service. At Hearsay, having customers as our first priority is one of our three company wide virtues.

![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/mentor.jpg)

Working at Hearsay was a great educational experience. Never having really worked with Python or Javascript before, I was thrown into the world of Django and Backbone. The number of things I learned this summer seem endless, from Jinja2 templating to creating new MySQL database tables, managing cross origin server requests, and writing REST APIs, the list goes on and on. Learning all of these new technologies required a lot of experimentation, self learning, and obviously Googling... a developer's best tool, but I could not have learned at the pace I did without the support of my team and the entire engineering department. Hearsay engineers were extremely friendly and approachable. I literally felt like I could easily ask anyone a question (They might have seemed too friendly because I might have asked a BIT too many... sorry [Tomo](
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomo-otsuka-3542994)). With great mentorship, I felt like I could have many productive discussions about the best way to design a new feature or a more concise way to write a piece of code. At an internship great mentorship is especially important because of the short time you are at the company. You are expected to quickly contribute, and with so much to learn, it is inherently very difficult. The friendly team made this transition much easier and made me a much more productive engineer.

 Although my main projects this summer were regarding user onboarding, I worked on a wide variety of projects, from improving our internal deployment systems to creating APIs for our newest product - [Sites](http://hearsaysocial.com/product/hearsay-sites/). I really felt like this summer I had a lot of freedom to define what I wanted to work on. Whenever projects finished up, I would ask other engineers for ideas on things to work on and even talked to our customer success teams to see if there were any pain points that they desperately needed to address. I even created my own small changes whenever I thought there was room for improvement within a specific system. Towards the end of the summer, I was even getting tagged in questions related about onboarding - a source of great pride as I felt like I truly could take ownership over the work I contributed during my summer. I felt that I grew a great amount over such a short amount of time. How roles have switched from the individual that was asking questions to the individual that was answering the questions. It was a great feeling to help the other engineers who have provided me so much guidance over the summer as well.

 Outside of the enomorous wealth of knowledge I feel like I could learn from other people at Hearsay, I really appreciated the company culture. From day 1 people were extremely friendly and enthusiastic to get to know you. There were numerous bonding moments with other employees, from waving hi to (and constantly bothering) our friendly receptionist every morning, to the countless coffee trips to the Philz coffee next door, and our fun company events 100 feet away at AT&T park. I cherish the friendships I was able to make this summer, not just within the engineering team, but company wide. The people at Hearsay were undoubtable the best part of my experience. The people at any company really make or break the experience, and this summer at Hearsay was made extremely special because of the great people there. Additional shoutouts to [<NAME>](http://www.sukhadakulkarni.com/), [<NAME>](https://www.instagram.com/carowong5/), [<NAME>](https://www.instagram.com/jizzlehshizzle/), and many others who made my summer so memorable

 ![Hearsay](/assets/images/hearsay-blog-post/interns.jpg)
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