A hectic week

Week 4: June 30 – July 6

A month into the internship and it feels surreal thinking about my progress so far. It’s certainly been a hectic week for my team at Roadsr. With the upcoming deadline for the automotive exhibition, my meetings with the whole team as well as my supervisor became much more frequent.

My task is still to implement the function that captures a video clip from a dashcam into a permanent cloud storage, but I have had to pivot in planning my function more times than I expected. A technical roadblock that prevented us from using the original package for the messaging layer (ZMQ) led me to use another package instead (MQTT) that eventually became instrumental in my implementation’s functionality.

It was quite interesting to reflect on my experience having to adapt to the skills needed in this internship. In my past internship at the fintech startup crowdfunding company in Indonesia, much of my Python skills were gained through DIY methods (free Coursera classes online, YouTube videos and some ChatGPT for practice) without much supervision as I was the only technically-oriented employee in the office. This required a lot of trial and error to get some analytics done, and even then, some errors would slip through the cracks.

This time, I utilize similar learning strategies but with more guidance from the CTO, which has been monumental for my speed of learning especially with having to understand the ins and outs of these unfamiliar Python packages within only a few weeks. I came in barely having used Python in my day-to-day code (my course curriculum demanded more C++ than anything else), so to instantly jump into using Python daily had been daunting at first but incredibly rewarding at the end.

Working in a startup also means being proactive. I met with another intern working on the inference function — an entirely separate part of the prototype but loosely connected with mine — where we mapped out how exactly our projects fit together. Although not a mandatory meeting, this helped me immensely in understanding my role in the company. There’s a lot of ownership given to entry-level employees, even summer interns, that exist in startups in contrast to big-scale corporates, and the idea of contributing to something that could be an end product is exciting to me, as it is for the other interns at Roadsr.