bradenwatkins.dev

What is Domo?

"Quirky billboards" are the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of Domo. It wasn't until I worked at Domo that I understood what they do. I would describe Domo's core product as a data platform that allows enterprise customers to upload, transform, visualize and view their data. Domo has 100's of data connectors that take in files, databases, and other 3rd party services. Once Domo's platform has the data, users can clean, transform and combine that data into a useful state. After the data is clean and useful, it can be visualized with Domo's large charting library.

How did I get an internship at Domo?

A connection in my network that helped me get set up with an interview. The interview process was standard compared to my other experiences. I had a phone screening with an engineering manager who asked me a straightforward data structure question.

I was then brought into the office once for two separate in-person interviews. From my perspective, I did well in the interviews. I didn't get the optimal solution for one of the coding challenges, but my communication and problem exploration had merit. One of the teams liked what I had to offer and I received a call a week later with an offer.

What did I do?

Domo assigned me to work on the "search" team. Our team worked to surface the content inside of Domo to be discoverable to the users.

My summer project as an intern was a feature that would allow users to save an advanced search query as a card that they could add to their dashboard to more quickly access the things they commonly search for. It allowed me to have my hands in the search backend (Java), search frontend (AngularJS) and build on top of the "Domo Apps" platform (Angular).

Although I had a dedicated summer project, I also acted as a standard member of the team by taking other tasks. I worked on other features and bug requests not related to my project.

After the summer, I led the development effort on a project to redesign the search frontend to make it more usable for the average user. As part of the redesign, we decided to convert the existing frontend (which was written in AngularJS) to React.js. It was a neat experience to pretty much own the frontend for my dev team at Domo. It felt like a lot of responsibility for a part-time Junior in college, but I'm grateful for the trust my manager had in me and my abilities.

Big should out to Earl Cahill, Andrew Holm and the rest of my team for their mentorship!

What did I learn?

Here's a list of things I learned from my experience at Domo:

• Added to my previous knowledge of a Java/Spring backend with JUnit tests (I don't mind Java, but it's not my favorite)
• Gained a bit of working experience with AngularJS (I was not a fan)
• Started learning React.js (have grown to love it since)
• Tried developing on a Macbook (have grown to prefer it since)
• Experienced what it is like to work at an enterprise B2B software company.

What was challenging?

Communication between dev teams inside of Domo was a little difficult at times. Part of that I attribute to my inexperience at working inside of a large company with tools like Slack. But I found that dev teams tended to be a little more siloed at Domo and I'm not sure why that was the case.

I also found that internal tooling and processes were not well documented. That made it hard for me to find answers to my questions.

What was it like to be an intern at Domo?

Here's a list of the benefits of interning at Domo:

• Competitive pay compared to other Utah valley internships (as of 2018)
• Free lunch every day
• Free snacks every day
• Monthly intern gatherings where you meet other interns and compete for prizes

Conclusion

My time at Domo as an intern and part-time employee was a big step on my journey from an inexperienced student, to a fully contributing member of a development team. A job or internship at Domo would be a great opportunity for anyone looking to work in Utah valley. If you're interested in working at Domo, don't hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading :)