Internship experience with ClearFeed

This post will be a bit different from my usual ones. I recently concluded my internship with ClearFeed and I think its a good time to reflect on my experience - not only to share it with others but also to remind myself of the lessons I learnt. I will try to keep this post as short as possible.

How it happened

ClearFeed is a startup based in Bangalore that is aiming to simplify the workflow between customers and support teams. I had applied to ClearFeed first in the month of March this year. I was told that since I was still attending college full-time, I won’t have the time to commit to the internship. I was a bit disappointed and started looking for other opportunities. A couple of months pass by and I see that the opening for interns is still open. I message the CTO and asks if he could consider me now - given that my semester was about to end and I would have a lot of time on my hands. He agrees and within minutes I receive a call to schedule an interview.

The interviews were fairly straightforward if you’re familiar with the basics of JavaScript, some React and some (probably unnecessary)trivia - which is to say quite different from most interviews I had given up until this point. The second round was focussed more on standard low level system design questions. In the end, I was asked for my stipend expectations and within a few hours, I had an offer letter in my inbox.

The internship

I worked on a multitude of tasks during my internship - mostly on the backend. During the initial 3 months of my internship, my tasks were mostly small and concise. I was given plenty of time to understand the codebase and explore the task at hand and never did I feel like I was being rushed.

Everyone on the team - and I won’t name names here since I’ll probably miss someone - was very helpful and always ready to answer any questions I had. I never actually watched any of their onboarding videos - something I probably should have - which meant that I had to ask a lot of questions - but they were always answered patiently.

In the month of July, I was asked to come to Bangalore for a month to meet everyone in person and work from the office. I was a bit apprehensive at first - while I always wanted to visit Bangalore, I was hoping for a shorter stay. But I decided to go for it anyway. I’m glad I did. I got to meet everyone in person and we even had a team outing during that time. I also had a lot of fun in Bangalore - I got to meet a lot of my friends and even made some new ones!

After that, I had to work remotely again since my college had started. This time, I was given tasks which were a bit more involved and required me to do a lot of research. Initially, I must admit I was a bit overwhelmed - I had never worked on anything like this before. I was also very conscious of the fact that I had to deliver a feature within a certain time frame. This meant late night calls, a lot of debugging and even more frustration during code reviews.

This all happened in the span of less than 2 months and its when I learnt the most - not only about the product and the codebase but also about myself. I realized that - despite everything - I prefer to work alone and asynchronously. As soon as a call, meeting or a deadline is involved, I start to panic and my productivity, unsurprisingly, takes a hit.

The End

This is also when my on-campus placements started and a few off-campus companies I was interested in also started hiring for interns.

I was conflicted - I had spent a lot of time here and was finally starting to get a hang of things. The safe option of course was to stay here - I knew the people, I knew the codebase and I knew what was expected of me. But I decided to take the leap and try something new. I’m not sure if it was the right decision - only time will tell - but once you have made a decision, you have to stick with it. I talked with a lot of people - my friends, several folks at ClearFeed - and everyone had a different opinion. In the end, I decided to go with my gut feeling.

I’m still not sure what lies ahead of me but I’ll take the lessons I learnt here with me wherever I go next. I’m grateful to everyone at ClearFeed for giving me this opportunity and I wish them all the best for the future. If you’re looking for an internship and are interested in the work they do, I would highly recommend you to apply - you won’t regret it.

And as always, thanks for reading!