We’re excited to announce the restart our internship program for this upcoming fall semester! We put our program on hold temporarily during the Covid-19 pandemic and have been looking forward to restarting it with a new group of interns. As before, the goal of the continuing program is to bring in a group of upperclassmen students (grad and undergrad) and enable them in dev/ops culture, agile methodologies, and cloud technology.
The Format
Like previous internships, there are up to four interns joining our team part-time (20 hours) through the fall semester. The interns will own their project for the entire lifecycle from inception and planning, through implementation and testing. The project is run with an agile philosophy using daily stand-ups, weekly demos, two-week sprints, and a backlog. One of the end goals is to teach how software is built in modern companies and teach how to thrive in an agile environment. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, interns will be sharing their experience by collaborating on blog posts describing the experience during and at the conclusion of their project.
Note: Due to current public health concerns this will be operated as a remote-first internship. Our business space will be open to the interns during normal business hours, however, remote collaboration via Slack and Zoom will be used for most team interactions.
Pick Your Project
In our previous internship cycles, the interns collaborated and picked the project they would work on for the length of the internship. This allows the internship to be flexible and adapt to the group’s experience and interests. We will be providing five choices in the roadmap for our existing open-source projects (Tweed, SHIELD, Genesis, Safe).
Here is an example project from summer 2019:
The Kubernetes container orchestration system relies on a single persistent data store for its metadata and configuration needs: etcd. This distributed key-value store is vital to the proper operation of Kubernetes and, assuming identical replacement hardware / component configuration, the data in etcd is all that an operator needs to resurrect a dead cluster.
Design and build a SHIELD Data Protection Plugin for backing up the data in etcd, and restoring data to etcd from those archives. This plugin must work within the existing contract SHIELD has for “target” plugins. To enable this effort, you will need to be able to deploy and validate both Kubernetes and SHIELD. We will provide you hardware for both.
This project is split fairly even between development and operations work. SHIELD plugins are virtually all written in Go.
The goal of the five projects is to lie on the spectrum of purely software development, to mostly operations, with most lying somewhere in the middle.
Want In?
We have started to speak to candidates interested in joining our Fall 2021 internship and are looking to finalize participants by the end of August. If you’re interested please email your résumé and a small blurb about why you are interested to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you! Given the remote-first nature of the program this fall, candidates outside the Buffalo, NY area are encouraged to apply.
What’s Next?
We’re excited to share this journey with you over the next few months! Be sure to check out our followup blog about the projects available this semester as well as posts from the interns talking about the project, implementation, and overall experience.
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