My Internship Experience at Flash
As my internship at Flash is nearing its end, I would like to share my experience working at Flash in the following article.
About Me
I am Puru Agarwal, and I am currently pursuing my B.Tech, CSE from Bennett University, Greater Noida. I am currently in my final year of B.Tech. We had an option of doing regular course work in the university or go for an internship and gain some real world experience. So, I chose the second option. I was always interested in solving problems through code from the beginning, so I chose this field. I am a Software Engineer(Backend) and have an experience of about 2 years building and breaking stuff with and without code.
About Flash (Company)
Flash is an early stage startup founded by a highly accomplished serial-entrepreneur and e-Commerce & Fintech industry veteran, backed by a top-notch founding team who have several been-there-done-that’s under their belt. Flash is focused on making online shopping effortless and safe for new age shoppers and brands.
About The Product
Flash is on a mission to democratise and simplify shopping by powering the confluence of new-age brands and new-age shoppers. The Flash suite of products leverage omni-channel data and cutting-edge technology with proprietary AI to eliminate friction for shoppers and offer a delightful shopping experience. Flash delivers differentiated and tangible value across commerce, checkouts and payment legs. Flash’s vision is to empower brands and shoppers with multiple product offerings which can make their entire buying & selling experience seamless and delightful. Considering the ever-growing online shoppers base in India (500M by 2030) and their increasing credit requirement to fund their aspirations (currently only 6% are credit active), Flash would play a critical role in helping merchants offer credit and in enabling a smooth experience to shoppers.
My Role
I have been working at Flash for the past six months. My primary responsibilities included working on the backend. I was responsible for developing backend microservices using Java. Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. During my time here at Flash, I worked on various small and big tasks, contributing to the product.
My Time at Flash
I contributed to the product by working on a variety of small and big tasks during my time here. I worked with AWS, Docker, and PostgreSQL in addition to Java. I lerned about a lot of AWS services and also worked with many of them including Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, RDS and many more.
I developed serverless functions for as backend microservices using AWS Lambda. The serverless Lambda functions operated as HTPP APIs that could be used by other services or directly consumed by the front-end.
Postman and Docker were two crucial tools I used. In order to test Lambda functions locally and to maintain a local database, I used Docker. Throughout the development process, I tested the APIs in general using Postman, and I additionally used it to describe the backend. The frontend team found it really easy to connect the APIs because of the documentation with good examples.
The past couple of months have been quite interesting. We have been deploying and collaborating more frequently. We even had weekly demos to track progress and keep up with deadlines as we move closer to the product launch.
I learned a lot about collaborating through git, resolving conflicts and refactoring code for better readability. I got to explore AWS in depth through the infrastructure that we are building here at Flash. Apart from these hard skills, my communication has improved a lot. I have become even more passionate about tech.
Guidance From Bennett University
As an undergraduate student, Bennett University has been nothing but beneficial to me. The instructors have all provided the students with a lot of support. The skills I acquired at Bennett University from my coursework and all the club activities helped me in my daily work.
