Geoffrey Angus, a software engineering intern at Instrumental this summer, shares his experiences building an exciting new feature for customers.
At the end of my junior year at Stanford University, I was determined to spend my summer doing something that mattered. I scoured the Internet for an internship that interested me and, eventually, I found Instrumental.
Fast forward to mid-June and there I was on my first day at work, fresh from my study abroad program in Paris and ready to get crackin’. My first project was pitched to me at the end of my first week and during the pitch, I realized that I’d ended up exactly where I wanted to be.
Over the course of the past few weeks I led the effort to build out a new feature that rolled out to Instrumental users this past week.
The feature I developed gives engineers the ability to select multiple units of interest from their investigations, and send serial number, configuration, and all other relevant information to their teammates and factory counterparts directly from the Instrumental application. Paired with Detect, this feature allows engineers to easily share the defective units they have discovered faster than ever before.
When I started, I had next to no knowledge of the code base and its underlying technologies, but the team was confident on my ability to learn quickly. I definitely couldn’t have done it without the help of my mentor, Isaac. We went back and forth over the course of a few weeks, talking about what needed to be done to make the new feature both robust and user-friendly. After writing the functional tests, styling the page, and putting it all together for code review, I’d built a feature that was ready to help increase Instrumental’s functionality for all of our customers.
Geoff discussing implementation ideas with his mentor, Isaac.
Recruiters often sell their company’s internship as impactful and educational, but few experiences actually live up to the hype. My intern project got me out of my comfort zone and put me in a place where I had to apply what I was learning every single day. The engineers at Instrumental truly believe in their product and the people working on it; this passion manifested in their efforts to make sure that my internship experience has been both exciting and meaningful.
I’m proud to have built a feature that will change the way our customer engineers work, and I’ve still got nearly a month left in my internship. I look forward to our next release!
Instrumental is hiring — check out our job postings, including front end and full stack web developers, sales development, and marketing.
