Meet Tuhina, Software Engineering Intern @ BigCommerce

Hi! I’m Tuhina Das, and I’m a rising senior in high school. This summer, I interned with the Mobile Team here at BigCommerce.

Ever since taking my first coding course at the start of high school, I’ve always had a profound interest in building software. So naturally, I wanted to learn more about different specialties in software engineering and the tools they involve. This ultimately led me to take courses with Code2College (C2C) in 2023, a nonprofit striving to “increase the proportion of historically [underrepresented] high school students who enter and excel in STEM… careers.” That fall, I joined C2C’s Internships program, which partners with companies to place students in technical internships. Through this program, I got to meet the incredible Mobile Team for the first time.

Going into this internship, I was very excited because I finally could get a feel for what it’s like being a software engineer, a career path that I was seriously considering. I was also looking forward to meeting and getting to know people at the company, both in and out of the team.

My first two weeks at BigCommerce was a sort of ‘set-up’ period – I, along with my fellow intern Arushi, completed our onboarding tasks and kept track of different tools we could explore the next few weeks through a 30, 60, and 90 day plan that the team provided. After completing all our required training and receiving access to the team’s codebases, we were finally assigned our first ticket: to implement stylized designs of an in-app satisfaction prompt for the BigCommerce iOS app. The prompt included a header, description, and buttons to navigate through it and close it.

Using Swift, the coding language used to power iOS apps, for the first time and navigating the expansive codebase that the team had put together over the course of years was somewhat daunting. But the Mobile Team was more than happy to help me learn the ropes of building my first Swift project. By the end of my third week, I had started creating a mock-up of the prompt's user interface.

After building the mock-up, I started working on implementing it in the Mobile Team’s codebase. Arushi and I met daily with Tina Ho and Kymarly Henry, two software engineers on the team who mentored us throughout our internship, to better understand how to build and style the prompt with SwiftUI. And before we knew it, we had our first pull requests (a request to merge your code into the codebase) for our assigned tickets, and the iOS prompt was finished!

We then started working on the prompt for the Android app, which was starting to feel less daunting now that we had created one for the iOS app. We spent the next two weeks familiarizing ourselves with the Android codebase bit by bit, and then started implementing the second prompt. We are just beginning to wrap up this prompt, and hopefully we'll see it released sometime in the near future.

I have a lot of fond memories of my internship this summer, so I'd like to highlight a couple with you that I think best reflect my experiences as a BigCommerce intern.

I’ll start off with Friday Throwdown meetings. Every Friday afternoon, the Engineering Department at BigCommerce meets up to catch up with each other. The agenda covers a wide variety of topics, from Big Wins to anniversaries/birthdays/pets/new hires to executive announcements and dad jokes. My first week, I was admittedly a little nervous to introduce myself to such a large audience. But in the weeks after, I felt as if I were right at home; there’s an evidently warm and collaborative environment fostered by everyone in the department.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Brent Bellm and Travis Hess, the CEO and President of BigCommerce, respectively. As a teenager constantly seeking guidance on how to navigate adulthood, I thoroughly enjoyed getting to hear about their experiences and lessons they learned in life. Amidst our conversation, we discussed the importance of investing in taking care of yourself and how that could be a powerful driving force for motivation. We also spoke about not shying away from exploring different careers of interest. It was inspiring to speak with Brent and Travis and get to know them, and I’m incredibly thankful to be able to have done so.

BigCommerce's commitment to establishing a sense of community amongst its employees – as well as its emphasis on taking care of them – was evident in the past eight weeks I spent interning here. It's why my experience has been a memorable one.

I learned a significant amount about a software engineer’s day-to-day activities, and I can confidently say that I’ve grown not only professionally, but also personally because of this internship. I'd be in a very different place today without having worked here, and without the Mobile Team's guidance and support. Because of them, I know that this is a field I definitely want to pursue. 

Special thanks to the Mobile Team, and thank you, BigCommerce! Think Big!