My Internship at Sourcegraph

My 12-week internship at Sourcegraph came to and end this week, and it's been a phenomenal ride. From my first interaction with Beyang back in December, my interview process, and finally the internship itself -- there's been so much learning and experience to take away from!

Sourcegraph is tool for "universal code search" - think Google (and all its intelligent capabilities) for code. I've always wanted to work on developer tools - there's something enriching about making my, and my fellow devs' work more productive and lives easier. Sourcegraph perfectly represents that! More so, remote-first and transparent culture is a huge plus! Having worked remotely for my first two internships, I understand and am very comfortable with working remotely and asynchronous communication. And if that wasn't enough, Sourcegraph being completely open-source and the work I do be available out in the open was particularly exciting! :D

I was part of the?Frontend Platform Team, which is responsible for providing internal Sourcegraph developers a smooth experience when building the many clients applications. This includes ensuring accessibility, handling the monitoring and observability systems on the client-side, and creating and maintaining the various components for the in-house design system - the Wildcard Library.

From the start, I was given freedom to choose my own internship project(s), as per my interests. The few projects that I worked on were:

• Created an?RFC?to build a unified logger service for improved client-side logging by Sourcegraph's different consumer applications.
• Worked on improving observability and monitoring across the webapp through better Sentry integrations.
• Improved maintainability and speed of the Repository Contributors page by replacing dependence on RxJS with direct calls to the GraphQL API using Apollo Client.
• Created many ESLint rules through AST traversal to catch bad-practice and error-prone code.
• Contributed to 5+ accessibility improvements throughout the webapp and core components used by other clients.

You can view all my code contributions using this?Sourcegraph search.

Speaking of code, the projects that I chose to work with (especially when improving client-side observability), enabled me to touch upon a wide range of areas in the codebase that were primarily out of my domain - infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines - which became a breeze thanks to the help I received from my teammates.

One of my greatest takeaways from this internship has definitely been the power of good communication, which the remote and async culture demanded from us. Regularly writing stuff down enabled me not only build on communication skills, but also provided a strong and personal review and accountability system.

Finally, I'd like to thank Kemper Hamilton for creating this amazing and fun experience, Jason Gornall for being the most approachable manager I could've asked for, my teammates Valery Bugakov , Tom Ross , Laura Hacker and Taylor Sperry for all the immediate help in navigating the codebase, working with me on the several PRs and projects, and everyone else at Sourcegraph! I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work here.