ABEJA Internship Report/Smith College Maria

ABEJAのインターンに参加するために、アメリカから来日してくれた学生がいます。

世界最高峰の女子大学として、セブンシスターズに名を連ねる全米最大規模のスミス大学で、コンピュータサイエンスと経済学を専攻するMariaさん。名門大学の学生がABEJAの何に期待してやってきてくれたのか、そしてインターンを通じて来年度の入社を希望し、決断するまでの3か月間をご紹介します。

インターン関連記事：

IoT,Bigdata,AI時代に、最高の仲間と過ごしたインターン

インターン体験談:自分の正しい道を探して/京都大学工学部G.K

インターン体験談:研究での成功体験/豊橋技術科学大学T.M

Who am I

I’m a senior student from Smith College, United States. I currently double major in Computer Science and Government. I was honored to take a roughly three-month-long internship at Abeja in my junior year summer (this past summer). I had a great time and learned a lot from the internship experience at Abeja. To me, Abeja is pleasant place to work and pursue career goal in many aspects.

Why ABEJA

Before I decided to intern at Abeja, I was looking for tech companies in Japan that have interesting project and good company culture. I know that I am interested in taking a front-end position. So I was also trying to find a company that would best match my technical as well as cultural background. Abeja is one of the target companies on my mind.

First, Abeja is developing some very interesting products, which are backed up by machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. The product has already entered the market, and has been put in service in many retail shops as well as shopping malls. I chose Abeja because I got to develop exciting product, learn important technical skills and create real values in the society.

Second, I had two separate meetings with Abeja CEO and Abeja engineers. From the CEO, I learned that as an engineer intern, I was welcomed to join different engineering teams if I like. Abeja has three main engineering teams: dashboard team, data science team and research team. As an engineer, I am free to choose and switch teams. There is so much learning space for engineers to improve themselves at Abeja. After meeting Abeja engineers on Skype, I figured that people at Abeja are open-minded, loving their jobs and are professional. Thus, I decided to join Abeja as a summer software engineer intern.

What I did

When the internship began, I joined Abeja dashboard team since I was interested in front-end development and web application. The main task was to assist other dashboard team members to develop and improve Abeja dashboard. I started by learning Vue.js framework since our dashboard was built using Vue reactive components. Many other tools were learned along the way: GitHub version control, webpack, Firebase, code review system, and etc. I also used d3.js to build interactive graphs and charts. I got to learn how software engineers work as a team: deploying scrum and agile team and task management methodology. We had two daily scrum meetings to discuss daily tasks. We used kanban board to keep track of task progress. We would sometimes have “Tera talk” on user experience or just a talk by a team member who wants to share knowledge to the whole team. We would have KPT (keep, problem, try) meeting in the end of every scrum to reflect as a team on personal and team performance. Such teamwork experience was something that I had never learned and could not learn at school, and was one of the most useful and essential things I experienced and learned at Abeja.

Besides, I also made efforts in thinking ways to improve dashboard interfaces and user experience. I got to talk to customer support team and marketing and business team, and even got to go to the shopping mall and saw some of Abeja’s client shops. It was an enjoyable thinking and learning journey for me. I realized that to develop and finalize a product, it took many stages and need every part of the company to work together and sometimes, we have to make smart yet difficult decisions.

Besides, I also helped organize technical meetups at Abeja. In July, Abeja held a meetup on Big Data Tool. In August, we had two meetups, one hosted Tokyo JS meetup, and the other was on Vue.js. I learned so many things from organizing and participating meetups. In the July meetups, Abeja data science engineers gave talks on tools they used in work and shared their experience with software engineers from other companies. In Tokyo JS meetup, four JavaScript engineers gave interesting talks on front end performance, JS machine learning library and etc. I got to meet many experienced front end developers and hear their stories. In Vue.js meetup, we were honored to invite the creator of Vue.js Evan You to have a Skype meeting with us. It was thrilled to meet the creator of the tool that I learned and used for the entire summer. Abeja encouraged its engineers to participate in meetups, and strongly supported organizing and hosting meetups because Abeja believes in providing open platform for not just Abeja engineers, but also all engineers to learn and share technology and knowledge.

Abeja is an attractive working place to me because of the friendly and professional people I worked with, and of the open and welcoming company culture and working environment. More importantly, I found self-value when I interned at Abeja and I believed that there is so much space for me to learn, grow and thrive at Abeja. That is why I applied for the return offer in the end of the summer internship. I agree with Abeja’s value, and believe I would enjoy keep working here.

Maria Xu