Intern with Me

Increasingly, I am getting requests from developers who express interest in working with me and my teams at Lynn Langit Consulting. To answer the core question — Yes, I do accept select interns to work with virtual project teams in my consultancy.

To be clear I am NOT seeking interns, however, I do chose to collaborate on a case-by-case basis. Here’s how I respond to candidate inquiries.

My Response

“Possibly. I typically pick paid interns based on the following criteria:

1. Remote pair program with me for up to 8 hours (1–2 hour sessions) unpaid.
2. Provide me with a list of the Linked In Learning courses that you have viewed (cloud topics in particular).
3. Direct me to any public code (GitHub, Kaggle, etc…) that you have written, so that I can review it as well. Expect that I will have one remote session where I ask you questions about your code. Questions will include the following:

— Run your code (and tests if you have any)
— Tell me about which sections of your code you are most satisfied with
— Tell me about which aspects of your project (i.e. refactoring, adding features, documentation, etc…) you are working on presently and why you chose to work on those sections next.

I do not read or consider CVs in my selection process — only runnable code.

After you review and provide me with your response to my three listed topics, then I’ll review and let you know if I’d like to proceed. Thanks for reaching out.”

Collaboration

The majority of the work I do is done via collaboration. Sometimes the collaboration is async (email, source control), but, most often, the collaboration is synchronous.

Collaborating with my Grandma!

Here’s a list of what I am attempting to evaluate by reviewing the above information:

• How do you solve problems?
• What type of resources do you use?
• How effectively do you communicate technical ideas?
• How effectively do you communicate business ideas?
• Do we enjoy working together?

Because all of my consulting projects are done in the public cloud, I’ll give preference to potential interns who have done any type of project there — even hobby projects. It’s great if these projects are running in AWS or GCP.

Mob Programming in action

Also it would be fantastic if candidates would watch my ‘Pair and Mob Programming’ Course if they are new to collaborative coding.

Domain Expertise

The type of projects I work on involve a particular set of domains. So any experience candidates have in these domains is highly valued:

• Bioinformatics — I have several projects around building cloud genomic data pipelines
• Machine Learning — Everything from scikit-learn variety algorithms (i.e. logistic regression, K-means, Random Forests) to TensorFlow
• Public Cloud — AWS or GCP preferred, also use are Azure or Alibaba experience

Tools

When I collaborate (remote pair program), I generally say that whoever is typing gets to use their preferred developer tools. Often when I take on interns, they are doing most of the typing as I am the one with the majority of the domain knowledge.

VSCode showing some of the extensions I use

That being said, several candidates have asked about the developer tools that I use. To that end here’s a list:

1. VSCode — updated version plus a large number of extensions
2. Google Colabs — really useful for all types of machine learning — GPUs and TPUs too!
3. Docker Desktop — also I use the included Kitematic and Kubernetes (Minikube) functionality
4. GitHub — both private and public repositories

Persistence

No, not the kind you are thinking about! Rather, if you are interested in interning with my team, be patient and persistent. My professional project workload has peaks and valleys, and I prioritize work for my clients. If I don’t answer you for days (or even weeks), try to contact me again — messaging me on Linked In is probably the most efficient way to contact me.