My Summer Internship at Kablamo Canada

The Work

I was placed on Kablamo Canada’s main project which is involved in the financial technology industry. All my previous internships were in backend focused roles so naturally I joined the backend team, however I had little-to-no experience working with AWS or Go language. On my first day I sat down with my manager Conor who reinforced that the main focus of this internship was improving my skills. I was onboarded onto the company and project and we fleshed out what was expected of me here. From there I was put on the same team as Luke, a senior backend engineer who was my mentor and crucial towards my Go learning journey! I’m very thankful that I was able to work alongside a senior who was always ready and available to help with any questions I had.

In the last third(ish) of my internship I was allowed the opportunity to spend some time on the frontend team to gain experience with React Native and Typescript. Outside of a couple courses here and there I had zero experience working as a frontend dev so this felt a little daunting to me however, I was assured by our Technical Delivery lead Jack that this was okay, and given a clear plan on how to ramp up onto this end of the project. I was given a fun Pokedex side project to work on for a sprint to get my bearings straight with React (which you can check out right here!) which helped a lot in getting used to writing and reading React. From then on I was given some small tickets to work on and made my way to larger pieces of work. 

During my time on both teams I was super grateful for the feedback left on my PRs. Massive kudos to Luke, Peter, Taz and Wahid for the reviews, answering any questions I had, and helping me work through issues. I learned a lot through reading others’ code which gave me insight to different implementation styles and approaches. 

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The People

If you couldn’t already tell in the previous section, what really made my internship great was the people at Kablamo. The people here are not only talented developers but also caring and dedicated to giving back. I was lucky enough to join after Kablamo acquired their own office space downtown and meet my teammates and co-workers in person. We held a lot of fun socials, like a potluck, hackathon, a QA meetup conference, our company summit, and more. These are what really helped me feel more comfortable with the team here and are my best memories from this term!

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I’ll miss the lunches, the after work billiards and drinks, and even going on an impromptu search for takeout creme brulee downtown (for anyone wondering, there is none). 

TLDR; Kablamo has some amazing people working here who are dedicated to helping each other, you won’t regret an internship here! Thank you guys, I’ll miss you!

Rebecca

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