The Tech Genesis Initiative is Emma’s Internship program to internally grow young talented individuals, to provide them with the right resources to develop into strong software engineers, in line with Emma's DNA, and give them real-world professional experience.
As part of this program, seven passionate and diverse individuals, two from the Frankfurt office and the others from the Lisbon office, joined to make an impact and help Emma grow and disrupt the sleep industry.
Our Company Onboarding
As part of the Genesis team, I, and the other fellow interns joined Emma on the 1st of November 2022 and started our company onboarding journey.
During the first few days, the onboarding took place remotely. We first got introduced to Emma and its products, as well as its multiple roles and teams within the company and their responsibilities. We had various remote sessions with intros to the Emma tech stack before flying out to Frankfurt the following week, to have the rest of the onboarding sessions in person.
The Frankfurt Trip
The trip lasted the whole week, flying in on Monday, November 7th and returning to Portugal (for the people based in Portugal) on Friday, November 11th.
After flying in and arriving at our hotel, we got introduced to the tech team members and all had dinner together. The dinner was amazing, we got to know some of our colleagues better, ate lots of tasty food and talked for hours.
We decided to extend the night by going to a nearby pub, where we met the company’s CTO in person and talked while we were having drinks. This would go on for the following days of the trip as well.
The following days were packed with tech stack intros, for example, Git and Typescript, as well as workshops on Agile frameworks and methodologies and some extra activities, but as an Agile and transparent company, we were given the whole week’s schedule in advance.
Tech Stack Intros
As software engineering interns, we had several introductions to Emma’s tech stack. Specifically, we had an introduction to Git, the workflow of Emma, and the most used commands, followed by a thorough guide to Typescript and why it’s preferred over JavaScript.
In addition to Git and Typescript, we also had a meeting on the fundamentals of Vue.js, the framework used for the frontend part of our E-Commerce website, along with Golang, one of the main languages used in the backend.
Agile Methodologies and Frameworks
Along with the tech stack introductions, we also got several sessions on agile methodologies and frameworks, such as Scrum and Kanban. These sessions were in the form of “Agile Games”.
The structure of these agile games was:
- Introduce the game and its base rules
- Some of the games would consist of various “rounds”. Each round consisted of a “reflection” time and a “planning” time, and the rules could also change.
- After the game ends, we would be presented with the definition of the methodologies and frameworks that we used during our game, and how they are used in real-life scenarios.
Props to our Agile Excellence Managers Tayeska and Daniella, who did an amazing job introducing agility to us in an incredibly fun and memorable way, which has made it easier for us to understand and use in real-life situations.
Extra Activities
Despite the goal of this trip being our company onboarding, Emma made sure we made the most out of this business trip.
The Engineering Managers had planned for us to spend a day of the week discovering Frankfurt together. A tour guide was hired, who showed us around the city center of Frankfurt and explained its history to us.
Following the tour, we went to the top of the Main Tower and saw an amazing view of the city.
Afterward, we went to a surprise escape room game, where one of our Engineering Managers, João, decided to join. Unintendedly, we applied the knowledge we learned during the agile games to be able to escape as fast as possible! It was a fun experience, given that none of us had been to an escape room before.
Another extra activity we had was a session on how to create a mattress, given by our experts here at Emma.
To top everything off, one of our fellow interns, Cvijeta, mentioned how she loves baking! So, we scheduled a last-minute workshop right before going to the airport: How to bake a cake! However, we ended up just making pancakes due to complications.
Conclusions
In conclusion, this onboarding experience was full of knowledge, insights, and a lot of fun. It truly highlighted the culture and DNA of Emma, and I can confidently say it served its purpose.
Nowadays, we are all distributed to our respective teams and are taking up our individual responsibilities, though that hasn’t stopped us from keeping in contact with one another. I cannot wait for the next big Tech Event that awaits us, and the impact the Genesis Team will bring.
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