On the Monday that I started interning, I remember being one of the first couple of people in the office, showing up at 9:30 in the morning. It was a very rare occurrence that would, unfortunately, never happen again. I had a lot of firsts that day. I was an intern for the first time (note the title) and shook a co-worker’s hand for the first time. I ate food from a San Francisco food truck for the first time. I drank soylent for the first time. I promised myself to never drink soylent again for the first time.
Despite being an intern, I had complete control over whatever work I wanted to do, since projects were free to chose from. Most of my time was spent helping develop the iOS SDK and demo app, but I also made contributions to the backend. I learned all those convenient terminal commands that I never bothered to learn in college classes. I learned about docker and microservice architecture and the pain of pulling images. I learned how to write clean, production-level Swift code that is well-tested and well-tested and really well-tested. I even learned, on multiple occasions, how to create retain cycles — which is not a good thing, since they crash the app fairly quickly.
For the most part, UnifyID gave me maximum creative freedom. There was pretty much just one annoying rule — never push changes directly to dmz, our staging branch — but I made sure to break that one a few times. The dmz branch is now push-protected. Special shoutout to Micah for failing to stop me at first.
UnifyID does some really cool stuff with machine learning like identifying who you are based on your gait. After being surrounded by smart machine learning engineers and data scientists, I got more into machine learning and worked on a small side project during my free time on weekends (and during a day or two in the office, see “lax and carefree environment”). Gonna have to shamelessly promote it real quick since it’s pretty cool, check it out here.
I’m now way more motivated to take data-oriented classes and pursue research opportunities, something I never seriously thought about before. If I hadn’t interned at UnifyID, where innovative machine learning algorithms are just one git pull away, I doubt I’d be as interested in machine learning as I am now.
I’ll have some awesome memories of my time coding in the office. Feeling like a boss as the CI tests pass with green check marks. Earning Yuliia’s approval as she cautiously merges my branch into her. Shout out to Yuliia for asking me to help out on iOS work during my first week and trusting me with a bunch of responsibilities throughout the summer.
I’ll remember the funny and good moments outside of work too. The late-night dinner conversations with Andres and Pascal. Isaac mixing up Divyansh and Vinay. Chunyu and I throwing some solid insults at Lef in Chinese. (Lef threw some insults back at us in Greek, but I’m sure they weren’t as creative).
I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work on cool stuff over the summer; and grateful for all the help the engineers and product managers have given me, and the tips and tricks they’ve taught me. I’m humbled and feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work in such an intellectual and driven, yet fun-filled, environment.
I’m sad to be leaving, but I’ll make sure to advertise UnifyID loud and proud when I’m back at UCSD — by wearing the extra company t-shirts I’ve surreptitiously accumulated over the summer.
