bigcommerce

Intern Spotlight: Amy’s Experience at BigCommerce Engineering

Our summer intern, Amy, takes you through her experience at BigCommerce Engineering.

Amy Nightingale

Aug 9, 2022 • 3 min read

BigCommerce Engineering Summer Intern: Amy Nightingale

I’m Amy Nightingale, and I just graduated from high school. I have been taking coding classes and heard of the opportunity to do an internship through Code2College. Their mission statement is “ . . .to dramatically increase the number of minority and low-income high school students who enter and excel in STEM undergraduate majors and careers.” I had my interview with BigCommerce Engineering in February and met with three professionals on the Mobile Team. Shortly after that, they let me know that I was chosen for the internship. I was very excited because this internship carried a lot of weight. I wanted to use this experience to see if I could picture myself as a software engineer.

Related Article: From No Code to Software Engineer

If you want to see how I feel now, find out near the end of this post.

The Beginning

During my first day at BigCommerce, I had to work through some technical issues before I could begin onboarding. Once I got past those barriers, it was time to jump into meetings and complete training. There was a significant amount of security training to finish before I could even look at the BigCommerce code. I spent a week wrapping up everything I needed to be able to actually start working on code.

I also attended a lot of meetings with the mobile team and many other engineering team members to discuss current projects and plan for future ones. My favorite meeting was the “chit chat” meeting because it’s a time where the team can get together and talk about things that don’t involve work. In my opinion, meetings like that really demonstrate that even when most people are remote, they still want to know each other and be a close team.

My Main Internship Project

Once I finished onboarding, the team assigned me a ticket to complete for the BigCommerce Android app. My project consisted of adding copy buttons next to customers' emails and phone numbers. I had an entire sprint, or two weeks, to do that while also having meetings and some other minor tasks. I used Android Studio and created a box for each button and then positioned it to be at the far right side of the screen. It was challenging to use an environment and app I’d never used before, but I eventually got the hang of it. I had an amazing mentor who would help me with every question I had at any time. I completed the ticket, and my project will go live on the next update of the app.

My Experience Overall

My overall experience has been incredible. I got to meet the CEO of BigCommerce, which was a huge opportunity. I was extremely nervous going into this internship for a lot of reasons such as fear of failure, losing my interest in coding, and thinking it was not going to be fun. Once I started working on my project, however, my apprehensions went away. I worked on an amazing team that was helpful, understanding, and fun.

I love the culture at BigCommerce and how they really prioritize the people and not the work. I got to truly experience what it would be like to enter the workforce as an 18 year old who hasn’t even started college yet. That is a huge opportunity, and to say I learned a lot would be an understatement. I could see myself working in this field, and that makes me really excited for the future.

Thank you, BigCommerce!

Meet BigCommerce's Engineers

The Beginning

My Main Internship Project

My Experience Overall

Get updates in your inbox