My Redfin Internship: Shafqat Dulal

Diving Right In

Coming into the internship, I had high hopes. Among other things, I was drawn to Redfin by the opportunity to make a great impact and the chance to do full-stack development. They did go out of their way to show me the kind of things I could do; one interviewer even pulled out their laptop to show me a feature a past intern built for the website!

Things were a bit overwhelming on the first day, since I didn’t have that much experience with web development and huge codebases. Thanks to ramp-up and code labs, however, I was able to set up within a week and get prepared for real work! Not long afterwards, I got several bugs fixed.

My Project: Draw Your Own Search on Desktop

My project was to add the Draw Your Own Search (DYOS) feature on desktop. Prior to this past summer, users could only draw searches on mobile apps and then run them on desktop, but not the other way around.

Through the project I got familiar with several aspects of development. Among other things, I picked up some major technologies. In particular, I got to know React really well. That JavaScript library has proved to make front-end development a very fun and intuitive! The Google Maps API was also important, seeing that DYOS involves heavy interaction with the map. It was also cool when I needed to look into established, well-researched algorithms in order to implement parts of DYOS (e.g. processing custom polygons after the user had completed the draw) and understand what was happening behind the scenes for polygon searches.

Of course, there’s the soft side of development. With a project that was so involved and unlike anything I’d ever done in school, engineering processes and methodologies really came into play. Although building DYOS looked intimidating at first, it turned out to be not so bad after breaking it down into its components and adding layers of indirection (as one would for many problems in computer science, it seems)! From discussing designs with designers to communicating with product managers to getting help and direction from my mentor, it was a great experience building DYOS.

It was fantastic when I got to see DYOS get released and have millions of people get access to a highly useful, customer-facing feature. Not to mention, some of those people who had requested the feature years ago ended up returning to the forums to thank us for finally adding the feature! I really can say that I’ve been able to do impactful work at Redfin.

The RedfInternship and The Front-End Blessing

Overall, interning at Redfin has been one of the best experiences that I’ve had. The company’s culture is amazing and everyone is so open and accessible (we interns were even able to meet and talk with several executives, including the CEO)! Not to mention, several fun events happened throughout the summer, from exploring Muir Woods after work to traveling up to Seattle to have a BBQ at the CEO’s house to hacking with all the engineers at headquarters!

The development that I did was valuable experience, as well. I got to work with several technologies that were new to me. My perspective of front-end has changed significantly, too. Before the summer, I was slightly reluctant to do front-end due to some not-so-great experiences that I had earlier. While I was a full-stack developer at Redfin, the ratio of work between front-end and back-end (read: in favor of front-end) proved to be quite surprising. Nonetheless, it was a blessing to have gotten to work with front-end as much as I did this internship. I understand it much better now. The key takeaway I’ve found is that with the right tools, technologies and problems to tackle, front-end can pose quite the engineering challenge.

At Redfin, I have gotten a proper engineering challenge, and a memorable summer.