Last summer, I had a 13-week Software Engineering Internship at Google Poland, Warsaw Office.
Warsaw was a nice city with convenient public transportation and relatively stable weather conditions in the summer. At Google Poland, I was working on the 12th floor. In the office, there was a cafeteria serving three meals per day, micro-kitchens on each floor serving a variety of fruits, snacks and drinks. There were also other useful facilities such as a library, nap rooms and a gym. For entertainment purposes, there were game rooms with ping pong table, lego, board games, guitar, drums, PlayStation and a Virtual Reality room. In general, it was a really nice working environment.
As for my projects, I contributed to BorgCron – a job scheduling system. Originally, only the owner of a BorgCron job could manage the job. What I did was to extend the system so that the owner can allow other people to also manage his job. In addition, I also contributed to Conga – a system aiming at boosting productivity of Googlers. With Conga, Googlers can focus on developing new features while repetitive tasks such as deployment are handled automatically by Conga. I finalized the implementation for supporting BorgCron jobs in Conga and launched an alpha release. Thanks to the implementation of this long-awaited feature, I received a gThank from another Googler. As the final part of my internship, I focused on improving user experience for Conga users. To be specific, Conga was previously just a tool to create new BorgCron jobs while details of BorgCron jobs were only displayed in BorgCron user interface; in other words, users needed to use two different interfaces to manage a single job. What I did was make BorgCron job information also available on Conga user interface.
Besides the projects, I had a wonderful 3-day trip to Zurich, Switzerland for Google EMEA Tech Intern Summit. The summit gathered all interns from all Google offices in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It was a great opportunity for me to meet other interns and have fun with them. My friends and I went to a botanical garden and a Swiss watch museum in our free time. I really enjoyed the Swiss watch museum because of its fantastic collection of watches which spans across many centuries.
Written by Do Ngoc Khanh (GSEP 3rd year student)