This summer I’m interning at Rivet, a startup helping creators connect with their audiences. My internship is part of MIT Sloan’s Pozen Fellowship Program, which matches undergraduate students with MIT alumni-founded startups.
I’m doing frontend software development on Rivet’s web app. Rivet’s team all works remotely, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to visit my family in Iowa. Here’s what a typical day in my life looks like while working from home!
Yesterday; Thursday, July 28, 2022
8:45 a.m. I wake up and get ready for our team standup meeting at 9:00 a.m. Getting up 15 minutes before my first obligation in the morning probably isn’t ideal, but my excuse is that it’s the summer and I’m allowing myself to sleep in! This is one of the benefits of working remotely.
9:00 a.m. I log on to Zoom for the meeting. Rivet has a larger team compared to the other Pozen startups: there are three founders who were recent MIT graduates, two additional employees, and five interns (including me). During standup, all members of the team share what they got done the day before, and what they are planning to accomplish this day (my updates: I had just finished building a table to display users’ billing invoices, and started working on a settings page for our users to customize their personal link pages. My plan for today is to finish building the user interface for the page—more on this later!).
Usually, Rivet’s leadership (there isn’t a power hierarchy structure, so the founders take the executive roles) keeps our standup meetings short and efficient, but occasionally we take some extra time for other team-related things. Today we took a few minutes to listen to a podcast snippet about communication and narrowing our focus. Everyone shared some of their takeaways afterwards as well.
It was cool to see that Rivet had already implemented some of the ideas in the podcast, such as encouraging lateral communication between team members—I can approach anyone on the team as equals, no matter whether they’re technically the founders or my boss. We also try to focus on the details that create the most impact given the effort invested, such as making a quick quality of life improvement that users would appreciate.
After standup, the development team members stay on the call for a bit longer to check-in (or to “sync”—this vocab was new to me before my internship). This usually involves hashing out our tasks for the day in more detail or setting up additional syncs to pair program. After that, we start work for the day!
9:30 a.m. Another benefit of working remotely is having a flexible schedule. Thus, I eat breakfast after standup.
10:00 a.m. I actually start working. As a frontend developer, I mostly implement user-facing features in our web app. Rivet has a design team that creates mockup of what the website is supposed to look like, so my job is figure out how to translate those designs into code.
Rivet’s frontend uses the React framework. I had some experience with React from taking web.lab during IAP this year, but I’ve definitely grown much more comfortable with it throughout the course of the internship. I’ve also picked up how to use Redux Toolkit and Tailwind CSS.
The link page is a Rivet feature that lets artists create a personalized landing page where they can attach links to their works and post announcements and other content. The settings page lets users customize the style of their link page.
I start parsing through the design and building up the components, testing the website out as I go. This unfortunately requires some patience, because my laptop is too old to efficiently handle my code editor, my web browser, and the web app server all at once. However, persevering, I manage to make progress!
1:30 p.m. Lunch break—my younger siblings are at home for the summer, so we all eat together.
2:00 p.m. Back to work—I spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the code and fixing bugs.
Making the settings page was one of my first projects as an intern earlier in the summer, but now I’m going back through and adding more customization options in addition to refining the UI. Usually Rivet’s design team makes the website designs, but since I had previously worked on the page the team leaders asked me to make also make the design this time.
A view of the mobile version of the settings page + using Redux DevTools for debugging.
My main goal is to having a working demo to showcase during my check-in meeting at the end of the day. I mostly debug by using browser dev tools and looking things up on StackOverflow, but if I get stuck I ask my “boss” (Rivet’s dev lead; our team roles are very loosely defined) on Slack.
5:00 p.m. I have my check-in meeting with my boss! I screenshare and demonstrate the new features. There’s one small bug that I wasn’t able to fix in time, so I show my boss and he suggests some possible fixes. He also provides some additional design-related feedback, which I note down for tomorrow.
My work day is over after the meeting, but I’ve discovered how to fix the bug, so I quickly submit the changes to our code repository.
6:00 p.m. A music production community that I’m a part of is hosting a remix compilation this month. I’ve been working on a track to submit; the arrangement and composition is all complete so I’m finishing up the mixing today (I want to make a future blog post about the process!).
I’m still waiting to know if it will be accepted, but here’s the final result:
7:30 p.m. After dinner, my family goes to a nearby pond to walk around. The sun was setting and it was very pretty:
9:00 p.m. When we get back, I call my partner on Discord. We chat and watch the latest Nina Wang vlog together. Afterwards, I keep tweaking my mix until eventually going to bed.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed my internship experience so far! I feel as though everyone on the Rivet team is super helpful and supportive, and I appreciate the structure in place that has helped the internship go as smoothly as possible. Doing a lot of front end web development has helped me become more confident that this is a career path I would be happy with in future—I like the process of creatively solving design problems and building cool user-facing features.
While I am a fan of the flexibility of remote work, I do miss having more in-person interaction. I also think having a routine of going to a physical workspace could also be helpful, since it’s not always easy to focus on my own or at home.
Being away from the hustle and bustle of Boston has been relaxing, especially after the solar car race. I haven’t gone out very much due to COVID, so using the time on music instead has been nice. However, I am very excited to return to Boston! I’ll be finishing up the last week of my internship there, and then I’ll be free to explore the city and work on more personal projects.
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