Aine Kearns is majoring in visual arts and minoring in computer science at the University of British Columbia. She is spending 8 months at Hootsuite as a software co-op, where she works with the channel integrations team.

Who we are

I work on the channel integrations team at Hootsuite, a social media management platform. On my team we ensure that our top tier partners (eg Instagram, Twitter) work properly with our services — including ensuring our clients can add social profiles seamlessly and providing internal APIs and microservices for other teams to use. My primary role is to help my team achieve their sprint (biweekly) and epic (quarterly) goals by choosing and completing small, achievable tasks that are broken down from those goals.

What I do at Hootsuite

At Hootsuite I change code that gets pushed to production on a daily basis. There are strong reviewing procedures in place that allow me to operate with freedom, learn, and make mistakes while still working with code that is an integral part of the website.

I love that I get the autonomy to take these bugs I notice and take action with them, it makes working at Hootsuite that much more rewarding.

At the moment my team is working on removing the Google Plus functionality, improving the authorization flow of our social media partners onto our website, and working with Instagram to expand our integration. We are constantly looking to improve our integrations so we have been working as a team to identify key pain points for users.

I have personally worked on removing unused code that makes Google Plus appear to users, improved bugs in the code, and been responsible for thoroughly testing my code.

While completing tickets, I am always keeping my eyes out for ways to make our site more user friendly and dependable. I recently logged into Hootsuite when I noticed some unexpected behaviours so I spun up new tickets to fix the problems. I love that I get the autonomy to take these issues I notice and take action with them, it makes working at Hootsuite that much more rewarding.

What I am learning

The most important thing I want to learn on the duration of this co-op is to develop my ability to work in a large codebase effectively.

• Every single day on this co-op I have been able to learn something new and work in a codebase that I was not familiar with. I’ve learned so much more about git and Github — and our reviewing process through it, and technologies I’ve never worked in before — like Scala, PHP and Kubernetes. The development that is done in a company such as Hootsuite is vastly different from anything that I have worked on in school, with much larger and more complex systems.
• Hootsuite prides itself on its agile development. I have learned about how priorities can rapidly change, and how important it is to respond appropriately when they do — whether that be quickly finishing up a task, putting it aside, or asking for help when I’m out of my depth.
• There is a strong blameless culture at Hootsuite, which has helped me work on tasks to the best of my ability. I am able to code and learn without fear of making mistakes because there are many safety nets in place to ensure that I am able to learn while still creating useful and correct code.

My challenges here

One challenge that I have faced at Hootsuite has been encountering programming problems that were too difficult to complete on my own. My team members have been very helpful in these circumstances and always help to teach me. This has been a great learning experience, but it can be discouraging sometimes to not be able to complete any tasks on my own.

To overcome this I will be more reflective in the future about taking tasks with various different difficulties so that I am able to learn every day, while also feeling challenged and fulfilled.

My mentor advised me recently on this problem and suggested that I start keeping a journal in which I reflect on each task as a work through it. First to think about how difficult the task will be and how much help I will need on it, and then log my experience and changing expectations as I continue to work.

My advice

My advice to future students looking to apply to my position is to:

• learn some of Hootsuite’s system architecture, see here, enough to put on your resume
• review coding questions for the interview
• not be afraid to speak up and ask questions while working.

These are all important to Hootsuite when they’re looking at individuals to hire and will also help you make the most out of your experience here. The more prepared you are going into the interview, the more likely you will get the job; and the more prepared you are for the job, the more you will grow as a developer and an employee.

Connect with me on Linkedin and check out Hootsuite’s student jobs .

My Experience At Hootsuite was originally published in Hootsuite Careers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.