My Experience As An Intern At Tucows

By Boris Ng | Jr. Database & DevOps Engineer (Co-op)

I’m currently an Industrial Engineering student at the University of Toronto going into my third year, and for this summer, I was fortunate enough to join Tucows as a Jr Database and DevOps Engineer. In fact, I got this internship through U of T’s 4-month internship program, ESIP, which is designed specifically for 2nd and 3rd year engineering students. U of T also offers an optional 12–16 month Professional Experience Year program (PEY Co-op) where students can gain practical work experience before graduation.

Since my first year, I have been vastly interested in software development. When my friend first introduced me to the world of web development, I was intrigued by how much I can do with the open-source tools available on the market. Tools such as React.js & Express.js have allowed me to create multiple web apps without too much of a learning curve, which I found fascinating.

As of right now, I’m three months into my 4-month internship at Tucows, and I’ve already come across many different learning opportunities which have made my internship experience a meaningful and fulfilling one.

My Team

As my job title suggests, I’m involved in databases and DevOps. In fact, I am on the database services team under the Infrastructure team. My team consists of my manager who’s the principal database architect, four database administrators, and two interns including me. My teammates have all been very welcoming and helpful, and my manager has given me many opportunities to grow as well as the autonomy to make multiple technical decisions.

As I mentioned, the focus of my internship is database and DevOps. For those who aren’t familiar, DevOps is essentially solving operational problems with a software engineering approach, and reducing the gap between development and operations. In my case, I’m currently working on an automated database solution, to achieve continuous integration and deployment.

Mentorship

To improve our internship experience as interns at Tucows in a remote environment, the HR and Talent Team has also arranged lunch sessions for us with several departments’ leaders, where interns all across Tucows can get to know each other, and get the opportunity to ask questions and connect with company leaders. I personally thought it has so far been a very positive experience. I am able to learn from the senior leadership and have gained an understanding as to how I want to progress my career as well.

Projects and Learning Experiences

When I first started, I felt that I was not contributing to the team enough to where I was making a big impact. I spent the majority of my time attending workshops and learning about the different technologies that I would potentially use. But it was at that time that I was able to gain a lot of theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience with databases and cloud tools, which has come very usefully in the latter part of my internship. Tucows had provided my team with third-party training, where my team and I attended multiple workshop sessions about PostgreSQL. This training has significantly widened my knowledge about SQL databases, where we had an in-depth discussion on the modern Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) and PostgreSQL architecture, and hands-on experience with database installation & configuration, backup, recovery, and upgrade.

Prior to this internship, I wouldn’t say I had lots of experience with databases and cloud technologies. I had learned and used SQL, MongoDB, and Google Cloud Platform in my own web projects, but I’d say it was really just scratching the surface. Throughout the internship, I have gotten the chance to work with many different technologies such as Python, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, OpenStack, Docker, etc, and I have gained a deeper understanding of these tools.

Currently, my fellow intern and I are working on a project where we are automating cloud infrastructure and configuration management with several Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, such as Terraform and SaltStack. IaC is an integral part of DevOps, it’s the process of managing IT infrastructure through code. Cloud infrastructure and specific VM configurations can all be managed through IaC tools. When I was first learning SaltStack, I found it a bit tricky, as it wasn’t a tool for copying and pasting bash commands from documentation. Since SaltStack is state-managed, you have to convert the commands into SaltStack functions. And every time the SaltStack file is run, it only executes unless the system state is different from the defined state. This might sound complicated, but once you’ve got a hold of it, you’ll find out how magical a tool it is!

Throughout my current project, I have gained an insight as to how everything is put together and interacts with each other, which has really helped me see the bigger picture. Having to dig into Linux and databases to complete some of my tasks, and tinkering around with Openstack Cloud, has forced me to strengthen my system and cloud concepts, and understand how everything works under the hood!

What’s next?

From the complex challenges I faced to the different workshops and learning resources available, it has been a tremendous learning experience for me at Tucows. If you’re looking for an internship in software engineering, I highly recommend Tucows.

About the Author

Boris is a 2nd-year industrial engineering student at the University of Toronto.

You can follow Boris and his work on his website: borisng.com and on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/borisnguoft/

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