Summer Update
Summer Progress (and interning at Wally World as a SWE)
Unfortunately to us college students, summer break has come and gone. However, I don’t feel very sad about it–it’s just another step in my journey to make it as a SWE. It probably also helps that I completed my internship at Walmart Global Tech, providing solutions for the number 1 Fortune 500 company. I also made some good progress on helping the leading CS club at SIUE, CAOS (you can find our latest progress on our website here).
My Time at Walmart Global Tech - NWA
Somewhat surprisingly, I really enjoyed my time in Bentonville, Arkansas interning at Walmart Global Tech. There seemed to be a general sentiment that many of the interns (and even full-time employees) were always looking to secure a job working for Walmart in the SF/Bay Area office, or even find other jobs in the Bay as well. I didn’t have this same mentality.
The Role
I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a relatively new idea first institured by Google. The majority of the internship dealt with full-stack development of using an API called Concord to allow WGT to install an internal SRE tool onto its servers.
Work-Life Balance
As far as FAANG-adjacent companies go, I really enjoyed how open and inviting WGT was. For every in-person day I had, I really enjoyed chumming it up with my team.
Web Devlopment for CAOS
The full-stack dev train continued past WGT this summer, as I teamed up with one of my fellow SIUE peers to develop a club website using basic HTML/CSS/JS. At this point, I’m not entirely happy with how it looks in its totality. Hopefully I can transition it to React or some other framework in the future.
Looking Ahead
As far as what’s on tap this semester, I don’t really know…I was considering starting my own Substack news site to write about racing, and of course, continuing improvements to our course website. I’m also looking to get involved with making my own AI model–I just don’t know what it will be about at this point. From my experiences this summer, I’ve learned the obvious: that the real world is nothing like college at all.