Ever interned at a tech start-up? Here is my journey.
My internship experience at Pepcoding Education Pvt. Ltd.
A common (and perhaps the most valuable) piece of advice given to all entrepreneurs when they are expanding their company is: “Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your company for you.”
My experience at Pepcoding was somewhat similar, the interns were treated with respect and the company didn’t think twice before investing in us in terms of tangible or intangible resources, and at the same time, we, as engineers, were asked to surpass our limits and work hard both for ourselves and the company.
My journey begins with the national level hiring contest organized by the company for a new initiative undertaken by them, known as LRC (Learning and Research Center), the objective of which is to make 3 lakh (300 thousand in the international number system) videos’ worth of (free) educational content for the world to get knowledge from. The official title given to my role was Product Engineer. Details of the hiring drive can be found below:
I was selected based on my performance in the required assignment, after which I chose to join the organization to play my part in this ambitious initiative.
Training
Coming to the actual internship, the training period involved solidifying our fundamentals on some of the major concepts in Data Structures and Algorithms, that are required by any engineer who wishes to make a career in this industry. The topics that we received training on were as follows:
- Functions
- Arrays
- Strings
- String builders (in Java)
- ArrayLists/Vectors
- Recursion
- Backtracking
- Dynamic programming
- Time/Space complexity
- Stacks
- Queues
- Linked lists
- Binary search tree
- Generic tree
- Hashmap
- Heap
- Graph
After this training was complete, the interns were streamlined into various verticals based on preference and performance. I was assigned to the Development vertical, which deals with live projects, and was more hands-on than theoretical learning.
Since my performance during the initial training has been well, I was asked to join the Backend department, and I have been a part of it since. The mode of training shifted from classroom teaching to self-study plus daily evaluations to check our aptitude and consistency. I was responsible for training on various backend frameworks, primarily Express (a framework used to manage servers using Node).
Tasks completed
As mentioned earlier, I was hired to work on the Learning and Research Centre initiative of the company, for which I have achieved the following tasks:
Tutorials on:
2. Take Input
4. Saddle Price
5. Search in a 2D sorted array
7. Buy and sell Stocks-1 transaction allowed
8. Buy and sell Stocks-Infinite transactions allowed
9. Buy and sell Stocks with transaction fee-Infinite transactions allowed
10. Buy and sell Stocks with a cooldown -Infinite transactions allowed
11. Buy and sell Stocks-2 transactions allowed
12. Buy and sell Stocks-k transactions allowed
13. Bubble sort
14. Selection sort
17. Node with Maximum Subtree Sum
18. Diameter in a Generic tree
19. Iterative Preorder and postorder of Generic tree
21. Target sum pair in Binary Search Tree
22. Target Sum Pair in Binary Search Tree (Alternative approaches)
24. Write HashMap
25. Heap Comparable V/S Comparator
Since the very day I was assigned to make projects and videos on the backend module, specifically using Express, I have shot 60+ videos that cover 2 projects (BuyMealPlan-An e-commerce application and Instagram Reels Clone, both of which were made for the purpose of teaching others the practical application of backend development), and 1 theoretical interview series on backend development using Express in particular and Node JS in general.
Click on the below links to view my work:
Backend Development using Express (Playlist)
Backend Interview Series (Playlist)
Technical concepts and tools that I had to familiarize myself with in order to achieve this were:
- JavaScript (Node JS)
- MongoDB (for noSQL databases)
- Express (Backend development)
- mySQL(for SQL databases)
- Postman (for Backend testing)
- React (for Frontend development)
- MVC Architecture
- Cookies
- JSON Web Tokens
- HTTP concepts
… and this list is not exhaustive. I was required to learn about a lot of packages that are useful for development, such as nodemon, nodemailer, multer, lodash, etc.
Two of the deployed projects can be viewed here, and here.
All the videos in the series show how to make this project from scratch. This project along with other modules in this series (Instagram Reels clone and Backend Interview Series) have been shot, and the videos are available here.
That is certainly not the end of my work in the last few months. I was also responsible for writing 250+ FAQs and MCQs along with some articles based on the topics that I studied.
Some of the links have not been added as the content was shot quite recently, and is with the editing and branding team. The article will be updated with the links as soon as they are available.
Conclusion
The journey is far from over!
Every engineer’s dream is to work on an actual social media application, and after the completion of my currently assigned tasks, I am looking forward to working as a developer on NADOS, which is a new-age social media platform for engineers and avid learners, that has content on Data Structures, Algorithms, Development (both conventional and cutting-edge), and so much more.
Thank you for reading!
