My Summer as an Intern at Shopify
Author, Heather Musson, August 27th, 2020
Since I entered the Software Engineering program at the University of Waterloo, I aspired to work at Shopify. During my third year at UW, I received an offer to work at Shopify as a Web Developer intern for my fourth co-op term.
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that provides an all-in-one solution for individuals or commerce giants to host, build, market, and manage a retail business. Shopify first launched its eCommerce platform in 2006 and, since then, has grown to support over 1 million merchants. Some companies powered by Shopify are Gymshark, Lindt, and Kylie Cosmetics. While I was working at Shopify it surpassed RBC to become Canada’s most valuable company.
The Interview Process
My application and interview process began in January 2020 when I submitted my resume through Shopify’s career page, and WaterlooWorks (UW’s co-op job board). I applied to the Web Developer Intern position, which is essentially a Front End Developer with a focus on development using React, GraphQL, and TypeScript. This isn’t to say that you can’t dive into the Ruby on Rails monolith, but that your focus will be on frontend development tasks.
The interview process started with a “Life Story Interview”, where I had a casual conversation with a recruiter about my experience and interest in the position. Next was a technical interview with two developers. I was asked to bring a frontend project and be prepared to answer some technical questions. During the interview, I was asked to walk the interviewers through my project. We covered questions about the technical considerations and design choices that I made. Next, we moved into the technical portion of the interview, where I was asked a systems design question. We covered concepts such as the organization of the application, database design, and other technical considerations.
A few weeks after my interviews I received an offer. My offer was with the Plus Web team based at Shopify’s Waterloo office. The team focused on the Shopify Plus admin interface and platform. However, I was informed that I would be working on Shopify’s efforts to migrate the merchant admin user interface from Ruby on Rails to React paired with TypeScript and GraphQL.
Soon after I accepted the offer, and in May 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, I began my co-op term while working from home.
Onboarding & Daily Life
I spent my first week at Shopify in onboarding, where I participated in various sessions covering information about Shopify’s culture, context gathering, developing merchant empathy, and setting up my development environment. This week also gave me time to meet the other interns, and get to know my team better.
After onboarding, I joined my project team and jumped right into development. My team was working on migrating the order details page from integrated Ruby on Rails ERB files to React paired with TypeScript and GraphQL. Rewriting the entire merchant admin UI had been a multi-year project. However, the team I joined was focused on the order details page. Migrating this page into React is an essential step towards migrating the entirety of the merchant admin into React.
Most of my time was focused on various fulfillment actions, such as requesting an order fulfillment from a fulfillment service, requesting a fulfillment cancellation, marking an in-store pickup order as picked up by the customer, and many others.
In addition to creating GraphQL mutations for the above actions I also made modifications to Shopify’s internal GraphQL schema. I fixed several permission errors which would have caused users to be unable to access the order details page. Furthermore, when my team members were blocked by missing GraphQL fields, I jumped in to add them as quickly as possible.
Closing Thoughts
The migration of the order detail page began over a year ago and should be rolled out to the public in the coming months. Joining this project for the last four months has been very rewarding as I helped push it a lot closer to the finish line. Although I will be in school when the page is rolled out to all Shopify users, I am very excited to hear about the cumulation of all the hard work my team has put in.
Working as a Web Developer Intern was my first front-end development experience — at all of my past internships, I worked as a full-stack developer. I really enjoyed focusing on front-end development especially learning more about how humans interact with computers. Although I focused on Shopify’s merchant admin UI, I was still able to use the knowledge I had gained previously in Ruby on Rails to unblock my teammates when necessary.
The four months that I spent at Shopify exposed me to many new experiences. Working entirely from home was difficult at times, but gave me more flexibility and the ability to spend more time with family. I had the chance to learn ReactJS which has been at the top of my “To Learn” list for a very long time. Finally, I met many brilliant people who taught me so much in my short time with them. Shopify has an amazing culture centered on the philosophy of “Get Shit Done”, and making the best eCommerce experience possible for merchants and customers. Being surrounded by like-minded people for the past four months has been a rewarding experience. I am so excited to see what I can achieve next.
Originally published by Heather Musson at https://medium.com on August 27, 2020.
