April 12, 2018 at 16:43Internship retrospective
Hello! I’m Vera and have been doing student internships at JetBrains for the fourth year. I have long wanted to tell Habr about it, but don’t get bored with reference information ! Therefore, I will tell you about one of my first interns. Meet Valya Kiryushkina, the developer of Educational Products , the head of academic practice at JetBrains and a student at the Computer Science Center . And it all started with him.
Bachelor in IT, Valya graduated from Tomsk State University, where, according to her, only a very organized and independent student could get the maximum benefit from education. After that, she moved to St. Petersburg and entered the ITMO magistracy in business informatics, which from afar looked like an interesting addition to the development experience. In fact, it turned out that without programming, Valya is bored. So in her life happened Computer Science Center, about which she now jokes that she managed to make another bachelor's degree for herself from a two-year program.
And since the CS center happened, practice inevitably happenedat JetBrains. Although “inevitably” is not quite the exact word: Valya won the competition for the implementation of one of the most popular projects and, as they sometimes say, “they don’t come back from there”.
Spring 2015 PyCharm Edu & CheckIO integration plugin project . Dozens of people were interviewed by Katya Tuzova.
“I was preparing for both interviews [the second was at Stepik.org - Approx. ed.], repeated Java, looked at what PyCharm Edu and CheckIO are. I imagined how to integrate these two pieces. “I was terribly nervous at the interview, it seems I mixed up all the words, but apparently I managed to convey the meaning.”
Katya - PyCharm developer- at that time led the creation of her Educational Edition. I remember very well how pleased she came from this interview. During the spring semester, basic things were implemented. Then, during the summer internship, the plug-in was brought to working condition, and it became possible to solve problems from CheckIO in PyCharm Edu. But Valya was not limited to this - as part of the project, she also managed to transfer to PyCharm Edu a beautifully implemented representation of test results in CheckIO and display of other people's decisions and tips. In October 2015, the plugin was released .
“At first, at the internship, I was scared, everyone around was so serious, they were sitting at the program - they all understand something about this! I didn’t know anyone, there were a lot of new things and it was hard. After all, IDEA- This is a very large project, there is a code base that should fit into the head. You feel so small, and around you is a big, complex world. There wasn’t much time for socialization at the spring internship, you come a couple of times a week, hang out with other interns, but you don’t have time to fit into the team. In the summer, another feeling has already appeared when you go to work, how you do everything, listen to what others are doing, tell what you are doing. You’re beginning to realize that you are like all these people, and you’re starting to talk to them. ”
After a summer internship, Valya remained in the team and spent some time supporting CheckIO, gradually mastering other tasks: for PyCharm Edu - integration with Stepik.org, for PyCharm - Code Insight and support for Jupyter Notebook. The last project interested Valya after a trip to the SciPy conference in the summer of 2016 in Austin, USA, and the implementation did not take long to wait.
“I heard a lot about the company before the internship and was already pre-configured to be very cool, and my expectations were met. It's nice when there are so many smart, enthusiastic people around who do very interesting things, some parallel projects that are not related to the main work. I saw very interested people, and at first it really surprised me, then it inspired me, then I got used to it and I just liked it. ”
Now Valya continues to work under the leadership of Katya Tuzova, but already in the team developing educational tools Educational Products, which allow you to solve programming problems in Python, Java and Kotlin directly inside the JetBrains IDE , and also enable teachers to create programming tasks with automatic code verification tests attached to them. This is an actively developing project, which has many ambitious plans both to support other programming languages, and to implement various ideas in the framework of modern educational trends.
“I like what I'm doing right now. And I always want to learn something. This successfully coincides with the fact that I do educational tools. I can combine work and my new experience. I would like to learn more about what approaches to learning generally exist, to watch how they are consistent with what is in our tools. The CS center now has a course on interfaces, where you can take your project and play the interface designer. For me, this is a look at my work from a completely different perspective. When you are a programmer, you are mostly busy with some “everyday” problems, but here is a more general view of things: what this tool does, how to classify it. I'm very interested".
JetBrains has the concept of a 20% project, when you can use part of your working time to teach, supervise interns, and develop useful non-profit projects. Having become a full-fledged member of the JetBrains team, Valya decided to try her hand at managing students, and this is what happened to her on the other side of the internship program.
Fall 2017. Cells in the PyCharm Code Editor . Several dozens of applications for the project.
“This year I got my intern. I seem to have conducted 5 interviews, before that there was a test task asking why you want to work on this project. This eliminated several dozen people who applied for my project just like that, without much motivation. At the interview, I had an example of code from IDEA, it was necessary to say what it does, just to check how a person can read the code. It was also necessary to find an error in the code and fix it. The main idea of the project itself was to check how it is possible to implement block execution of code in PyCharm. We did everything we planned. We also managed to look at some cool features about which I wanted to understand what it is, whether we need to do this at all. The very idea for such a project came to me after the SciPy conference. Someday I will definitely take another trainee! ”
At this our transfer comes to an end, then - an advertising break. That's exactly what internships at JetBrains do. We try to come up with such projects so that in the end the intern would have a feeling not that he just worked, but that he did something useful, and developers around the world will use it. Any serious wording on this subject can be found in my recent interview here . And the nearest summer internship set will open very soon - April 20, 2018 . If you are a software student, here is a good tip from Vali for you:
“Do not be lazy and get ready for interviews! Read about the project, think about why you want to do just that. Go to the presentation of projects and try to understand whether you can agree with one or another manager, because communication with him is very, very important. Try to evaluate what kind of independence the manager wants from you, and whether you can work in this format yourself. You can even directly ask about it at the presentation! ”
Bachelor in IT, Valya graduated from Tomsk State University, where, according to her, only a very organized and independent student could get the maximum benefit from education. After that, she moved to St. Petersburg and entered the ITMO magistracy in business informatics, which from afar looked like an interesting addition to the development experience. In fact, it turned out that without programming, Valya is bored. So in her life happened Computer Science Center, about which she now jokes that she managed to make another bachelor's degree for herself from a two-year program.
And since the CS center happened, practice inevitably happenedat JetBrains. Although “inevitably” is not quite the exact word: Valya won the competition for the implementation of one of the most popular projects and, as they sometimes say, “they don’t come back from there”.
Spring 2015 PyCharm Edu & CheckIO integration plugin project . Dozens of people were interviewed by Katya Tuzova.
“I was preparing for both interviews [the second was at Stepik.org - Approx. ed.], repeated Java, looked at what PyCharm Edu and CheckIO are. I imagined how to integrate these two pieces. “I was terribly nervous at the interview, it seems I mixed up all the words, but apparently I managed to convey the meaning.”
Katya - PyCharm developer- at that time led the creation of her Educational Edition. I remember very well how pleased she came from this interview. During the spring semester, basic things were implemented. Then, during the summer internship, the plug-in was brought to working condition, and it became possible to solve problems from CheckIO in PyCharm Edu. But Valya was not limited to this - as part of the project, she also managed to transfer to PyCharm Edu a beautifully implemented representation of test results in CheckIO and display of other people's decisions and tips. In October 2015, the plugin was released .
“At first, at the internship, I was scared, everyone around was so serious, they were sitting at the program - they all understand something about this! I didn’t know anyone, there were a lot of new things and it was hard. After all, IDEA- This is a very large project, there is a code base that should fit into the head. You feel so small, and around you is a big, complex world. There wasn’t much time for socialization at the spring internship, you come a couple of times a week, hang out with other interns, but you don’t have time to fit into the team. In the summer, another feeling has already appeared when you go to work, how you do everything, listen to what others are doing, tell what you are doing. You’re beginning to realize that you are like all these people, and you’re starting to talk to them. ”
After a summer internship, Valya remained in the team and spent some time supporting CheckIO, gradually mastering other tasks: for PyCharm Edu - integration with Stepik.org, for PyCharm - Code Insight and support for Jupyter Notebook. The last project interested Valya after a trip to the SciPy conference in the summer of 2016 in Austin, USA, and the implementation did not take long to wait.
“I heard a lot about the company before the internship and was already pre-configured to be very cool, and my expectations were met. It's nice when there are so many smart, enthusiastic people around who do very interesting things, some parallel projects that are not related to the main work. I saw very interested people, and at first it really surprised me, then it inspired me, then I got used to it and I just liked it. ”
Now Valya continues to work under the leadership of Katya Tuzova, but already in the team developing educational tools Educational Products, which allow you to solve programming problems in Python, Java and Kotlin directly inside the JetBrains IDE , and also enable teachers to create programming tasks with automatic code verification tests attached to them. This is an actively developing project, which has many ambitious plans both to support other programming languages, and to implement various ideas in the framework of modern educational trends.
“I like what I'm doing right now. And I always want to learn something. This successfully coincides with the fact that I do educational tools. I can combine work and my new experience. I would like to learn more about what approaches to learning generally exist, to watch how they are consistent with what is in our tools. The CS center now has a course on interfaces, where you can take your project and play the interface designer. For me, this is a look at my work from a completely different perspective. When you are a programmer, you are mostly busy with some “everyday” problems, but here is a more general view of things: what this tool does, how to classify it. I'm very interested".
JetBrains has the concept of a 20% project, when you can use part of your working time to teach, supervise interns, and develop useful non-profit projects. Having become a full-fledged member of the JetBrains team, Valya decided to try her hand at managing students, and this is what happened to her on the other side of the internship program.
Fall 2017. Cells in the PyCharm Code Editor . Several dozens of applications for the project.
“This year I got my intern. I seem to have conducted 5 interviews, before that there was a test task asking why you want to work on this project. This eliminated several dozen people who applied for my project just like that, without much motivation. At the interview, I had an example of code from IDEA, it was necessary to say what it does, just to check how a person can read the code. It was also necessary to find an error in the code and fix it. The main idea of the project itself was to check how it is possible to implement block execution of code in PyCharm. We did everything we planned. We also managed to look at some cool features about which I wanted to understand what it is, whether we need to do this at all. The very idea for such a project came to me after the SciPy conference. Someday I will definitely take another trainee! ”
At this our transfer comes to an end, then - an advertising break. That's exactly what internships at JetBrains do. We try to come up with such projects so that in the end the intern would have a feeling not that he just worked, but that he did something useful, and developers around the world will use it. Any serious wording on this subject can be found in my recent interview here . And the nearest summer internship set will open very soon - April 20, 2018 . If you are a software student, here is a good tip from Vali for you:
“Do not be lazy and get ready for interviews! Read about the project, think about why you want to do just that. Go to the presentation of projects and try to understand whether you can agree with one or another manager, because communication with him is very, very important. Try to evaluate what kind of independence the manager wants from you, and whether you can work in this format yourself. You can even directly ask about it at the presentation! ”