The 2019 KnowledgeLake Internship Program: A Summer in Review

KnowledgeLake Interns: Thanks for a Great Summer!

We formally launched our summer internship program back in 2014, and over the past 6 years, we have spent our summers with dozens of amazing engineering students. Our goal is to provide a well-rounded experience that will prepare our interns for their first software engineering job out of college.

From a technology perspective, the first 6 weeks of our program—known as boot camp—are focused on getting the interns tooled up on our technology stack. Most interns arrive with some compiled curly-brace language experience, so most of the focus is on the other technologies in our stack, such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, LESS, RequireJS, KnockoutJS, TypeScript, PowerShell, Web-API & GIT. During boot camp, we are also teaching our interns about our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the KnowledgeLake engineering philosophy, and finally, the types of problems that we solve for our customers.

The first month and a half of the program are intense but, by the middle of July, most interns are ready for the next step. They are asked to collaborate with the product management team to build requirements for an internal tool or enhancement that will improve our core product. The entire team works with the interns to follow the SDLC including steps such as architecture, feature & code reviews. Over the years, many of these enhancements have made it into the core product, and it is always an exciting day when their first feature is pushed to production.

While pushing an intern’s changeset to production is a common outcome, it is not the main goal of the program. Our primary focus is to create an opportunity for students to move beyond the IDE and focus on the technology, process, and interactions that are required to operate a successful software engineering team.

Looking back over the 2019 program, our interns worked hard to learn our processes and tech stack which enabled them to deliver several amazing enhancements while still having a lot of fun! We were lucky to have an amazing group of interns to work with this summer. And we can easily say that our interns are not the only ones who benefit from the program. Working alongside the interns is always a valuable learning experience for all of us on the team. Our current team members build leadership skills through working with the interns, and the interns bring enthusiasm and positive energy that carries throughout the office.

To all the 2019 KnowledgeLake interns, thanks for a great summer. We hope to see you next year!