Getting a foothold in the field of software engineering

Rui Le was fascinated by software engineering after studying it at university, and he wanted to learn more and acquire skills that would be useful in the real world. It came as no surprise that Rui Le quickly got engrossed in learning programming and developing applications. We spoke with Rui Le about his reasons for joining MatcHub, his experiences working here, and what he liked about MatcHub.

Introducing MatchHub Intern, Rui Le (Photo: Rui Le)

What made you join MatcHub?

Software development intrigued me and  I wanted to learn more about it. As a software developer, I wanted to hone my skills and learn some practical skills I could use in the real world. MatcHub is also trying to solve a meaningful problem, and that resonated with me and what I wanted to do. In the first instance, I joined as an intern for 5 weeks, looking forward to gaining experience during my winter break while I learned about industry applications of data science and AI. People were friendly and helpful, and I immediately felt comfortable. It wasn’t hard to get hooked, and now I’m a freelancer with MatcHub.

What was the most rewarding part of your experience?

 Applying the skills and knowledge I developed in university as well as in my own time, such as computational thinking, programming, Docker and Amazon Web Services, to practical and tangible products that were of use to the company.  Of course, learning and working with new things in MatcHub, such as the Django and Django Rest Framework and good data science practices was also meaningful and rewarding. Through the internship, I was able to accomplish practical results by finding and improving MatcHub’s data API, optimizing the code logic, refactoring and dockerizing the application, and finally integrating the data API into the core backend application. My small improvements and seeing their effects on making everything run better motivated me to keep working.

Rui Le merging PRs (Credit: Rui Le)

What was the most challenging thing you ever did?

I found making software design decisions at the beginning to be very challenging as unlike projects in school, I needed to focus on balancing actual business requirements and priorities to ship as well as software sustainability and maintainability (the ease of building new features on top of existing software for future upgrades.)

Were you happy with MatcHub?

Meeting passionate individuals through work was my favorite part of my job. I was very interested in company events like the first data science team meetup (which was also my first meetup), the Christmas meetup, and then the trekking meetup as I met new people. I also always look forward to meeting new people because it broadens my perspectives. Even though I’m introverted and don’t like large social events, company events definitely strengthen the company culture. Also, the company was very welcoming, and I find it a warm, nurturing place to be, where seniors and mentors were helpful and took the initiative to help newbies. In addition to that, I think that the people in MatcHub are driven to do more – many have full-time jobs and use their spare time to learn and push to make an impact, which really made an impact on me, making me want to do the same.

Rui Le, far right with his Data Team and CEO, enjoying a scrumptious meal