Internship Experience at Nodeflux

Introduction

Short introduction about myself, I am a university student from Universitas Multimedia Nusantara (UMN) majoring in Computer Science. I was an aspiring Game Developer since I was a child, I started modding a then-popular game, Warcraft III when I was in junior high school.

After reading my short introduction, maybe you are asking what is the connection with Nodeflux or Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.

Well, here is the explanation. I started to take interest in Machine Learning about one year ago when Machine Learning was just booming, it captured my interest and then I began to search a lot about it and then all my Google Feeds is now showing news and articles about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (with maybe a few games and game developments).

The connection with Game Development is that I took the Game Development Course as my sub-major. And then I met this lecturer, let’s call him Mr. J, Mr. J also has an interest in Machine Learning and by the time I’m writing this article, he’s currently studying (maybe graduating) Machine Learning in Universitas Indonesia (UI) for his Master Degree. Mr. J helped me fulfill my curiosity about Machine Learning every week and then one day he told me about this event, Data Science Weekend 2018. It is held at UMN, it is sponsored by GO-JEK, it is expensive (luckily I got 25% discount because I’m a UMN student), it has Machine Learning workshop with all of the three lecturers are from Nodeflux namely Richard Dharmadi, Indra Nugraha, Alvin Prayuda Juniarta Dwiyantoro. Long story short these guys introduced and inspired me to join Nodeflux.

Applying

The thought of joining Nodeflux didn’t come to my mind right away in fact I actually forgot, after getting hung up from a lot of companies (not rejected, just ignored), seriously, I applied to like ten companies and only one replied and that was after Nodeflux accepted my application. After getting desperate to get an internship, then I remembered Nodeflux out of the blue but I didn’t think Nodeflux would be hiring, but my girlfriend told me “why don’t you just email them and ask about it” (and I was like why didn’t I think about that), and so I did. Surprisingly, as far as I remembered in less than three days I received a reply answering my inquiries, the test, and the deadline. I did the test, passed the test, got Interview, and accepted. As a Web Developer. Why? well, I wanted to be an AI Engineer so much, but I don’t have the basic and experienced enough to make myself confident enough to apply as an AI Engineer.

The Internship

The Internship began and I was assigned to be Mr. Freddy’s (can’t find his medium username) mentee, he taught me a lot of things. In the first week, I was mostly learning the advanced part of React since I already know the basics. And then the next week, the second week I was assigned to create a prototype website, it was cool and all until they told me to use pure CSS to style the website. I mean I can work on CSS, but well there’s Bootstrap, Foundation, etc. I used to work lazily with Bootstrap, Foundation, and Google’s Material Design, so when I hear that I should work using pure CSS, I was like “ugghhh”. But on the bright side, I learned that well I’m more of a backend guy.

Before going to backend, there was this one-day project to create a mobile web page, it was cool, except that I regret that I came late to the office, so I had less time to work on it, but I managed to do it so yeah, cool.

And then Backend, Mr. Freddy asked me to benchmark between REST API and GraphQL, I did it, it was easy, the result favors REST API, but it seems like Mr. Freddy favors GraphQL was a little bit disappointed with the result, or maybe not, it just seems like it.

Then, benchmarking PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, and ArangoDB. It took a lot of time but I managed to conclude it with PostgreSQL barely beating ArangoDB as the second-fastest in requested queries.

Well, those are my beautiful first-month memories with Nodeflux, as for the not-as-good second month, I’m just gonna say that I regret choosing the second batch and should have chosen the first batch, as the second batch had too many overlapping schedules with my university and a part-time job I hadn’t mention in this article.