My two weeks as a Talazen:
Where did it all start?
In January, I began my third or final internship with Tala, and do you know what the icing on the cake is? Apart from getting an internship at such a prestigious company, I also got remote work, which I had always wanted. After applying to nearly 150+ companies, finally I received a call from Tala in December. My onboarding process took nearly a month; I had one HR interview and two technical interviews. I was asked about my previous internship experiences and a DSA question during the first technical interview while the other one focused on system design. After completing all the rounds, I received an email with the subject Welcome to Tala!!
Welcome to Tala:
I believe that how organized your business reveals a lot about the company’s work culture. I had various onboarding meetings on my first day with teams like IT, HR, and an engineering manager. I must mention that the onboarding process was quite seamless. All of the teams did their best to make me feel at ease with the process.
My manager introduced me to their slack channel, and it was there that I got the biggest surprise.
I got to know that I am the first Intern in Tala India history 😲. OMG!! I was overjoyed, but I also felt a sense of responsibility to set a standard for other interns to follow. After all, the first is always the first.
As I mentioned in my introduction, I am interested in social outside work. Tala’s Global Social Media Strategist reached out to me to discuss social things in India 😊. I made a Twitter thread also out of the highlights of our conversation.
My first week was nearly entirely devoted to attending various sessions and meetings. I had a meeting where I was introduced to the Tala India team and the team with whom I’ll be working. Everyone was so welcoming, and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from them. I had two sessions with my manager in which he shared my work plan with me and explained what Tala does, its architecture as well as Tala’s principles and vision. I must say that the way he explained it has increased my motivation to work. 🚀
Time to write some Code:
My tech lead introduced me to the project, tech stack, and other terminologies at the start of the second week. I was asked to create a POC (proof of concept) because I am already familiar with the project’s core framework. I simply asked him for one day to complete the project. I think this is the best example of why it is important to have a balance between DSA and Dev 👀. Now that the dreaded time had arrived, it was time for project setup. Setting up the project means being prepared to see a lot of errors.
But this time I am working on a Macbook for the first time, and I don’t even know all the commands and shortcuts yet. Thanks to whoever prepared my project’s documentation, but to date I have not done any project setup and have not had a single error, so here it was 😅. I continued to solve the errors one after the other. Sometimes some dependencies were not downloaded, and other times there was a problem with credentials. But I did it with the help of my lead, and I’ll make a PR to add solutions to all of the errors that I’ve encountered. All’s well that ends well 🥳, and I can finally begin my third week with a deep dive into the code, which was originally scheduled for a week later.
Stay tuned!! to learn more about my Talazen experiences.