This post was written by our awesome colleague, Maude "It's pronounced 'Mode'" Lemaire, whom we can't wait to welcome back after she finishes school.
I left New York City a few hours ago with every intent to return. Yesterday marked my final day as a tech intern for Rent the Runway but I still feel as though I'll be back on Tuesday, grabbing myself an ice coffee from the kitchen and tackling some new bugs. Needless to say it'll be strange heading to class bright and early and hitting the books once more.
I spent thirteen weeks working alongside some of the most insightful engineers at Rent the Runway's SoHo offices. Within just three months, I learned more than in a single semester of university. Pat (Newell) & John (Holdun) have taught me about writing efficient JavaScript, best CSS practices, and using Backbone to solve just about every problem. After a few weeks, I developed a decent understanding of Ruby where I had none whatsoever previously.
From my experience this summer, I learned most from the code review process. At Rent the Runway, when you're working on a new feature or fixing a bug, you start on a local branch. When you think it's all good, you make a pull request to merge your changes onto the master branch. At that point, your peers will review your code. They'll make comments about syntax, a block of code you can reduce to a single line (sometimes), and the bigger picture of your solution; sometimes it turns into a big discussion about how your code will scale and evolve with future features on the horizon. Although it might seem harsh at first, you have to go into the code review process with an open mind and hope to come out of every pull request a better programmer than you were before.
Everyone's constantly talking about building a scalable, maintainable system. There are discussions about the best practices everywhere you turn in the office. Don't know how a system works? Open up your chat and ask someone you think might know. Don't know the specifics of Ruby syntax? Just turn around and ask someone! You'll find experts in a bunch of niches and it's an environment that makes it incredibly easy to learn a ton of new things. As an intern, it's a perfect opportunity to turn to your neighbor and ask them a million questions about what they know! I was able to learn about product, business strategy, marketing and buying in addition to tech just by having coffee chats with coworkers. In terms of work experience diversity, you truly can't beat the Rent the Runway team.
The amount of women in tech at Rent the Runway is surprising. I wasn’t prepared to see so many, coming from a university program where barely 9% of us are women and having worked an internship the previous summer where I was the only woman on my team. It was great to see that no matter what background any programmer was coming from, everyone was open to their ideas. No need to prove yourself (which I've had to do in certain cases) – you're instantly an important part of this dynamic group of hardworking engineers. Even though I was "just an intern," I found that I was the only one ever saying anything of the sort. To my team, I wasn't "just an intern;" by the end of the summer, I was given just as much work as my coworkers and writing as much production code. There were certainly times when I seriously screwed up a pull request with a million rebasing related commits and caused a fair share of JavaScript errors but I'm happy to say I fixed more problems than I caused.
About a month before my original end date of August 22nd, I was sitting down with Jade, the team lead on our current project, when he asked when I'd be heading back to Montreal. At the time, I'd heard about Hack Week during the last week of August – a full five days of working on anything you wanted (so long as it made Rent the Runway better) and I desperately wanted to stay the extra week. With his support, my internship was extended by a week and I was able to stay and participate in the festivities. To top it all off, a few weeks later I was given a full-time offer! Beyond the perks of free rentals, unlimited vacation, and living in NYC, it's an opportunity I simply cannot pass up. Between the people in tech at RTR and the opportunity for fast-paced growth, Rent the Runway is a really (really) great place to work and you can count on me coming back after graduation.