My R&D Internship at Agorize

Alexandre Barthel
July 10, 2022
About Agorize

Back in June 2019, Ivan Lopes, a Telecom SudParis-student started a 3-month-internship within the Agorize R&D team. Coming from South of France, Ivan chose to grow his skills during the summer in Paris instead of enjoying some relaxing time by the beach. Let’s meet him!

Who are you?

My name is Ivan Lopes, I am a first-year-student at Telecom SudParis. I enrolled in a program dedicated to engineering in telecoms. I joined Agorize for three month as an intern.

During my spare time, I enjoy programming, problem solving and helping people out.

How did you hear about Agorize?

I heard about Agorize during a school fair. The goal was to display all the companies offering internships. I decided to stop by the Agorize booth, had my first chat with Clélia and left my resume. Very quickly, a recruiter called me and the recruitment process started from there.

How was the recruitment process?

The recruitment process was very professional. I had a first chat with a recruiter to better understand what I was expecting from my internship and learn more about Agorize. Soon after, I did a coding test at home. The feedback was positive, hence, I was invited for an on-site interview with the CTO (ndlr, Sami Touil).

He introduced Agorize to me from a technical standpoint and all the available topics for my internship. He let me choose the one I liked the most. Finally, I did a second interview to meet my future mentor (ndlr, Zouheir Isfaoun). When I met him, he explained a little bit more about the topic I was going to work on, the team structure and project management.

What is the topic of your internship? What did you work on?

Agorize’s platforms relies on a third party service to handle user searches. When I joined Agorize, the service required a lot of set-up, was costly and from time to time, bugs emerged. My objective was to provide different PoCs, evaluate the best one and migrate to the chosen solution. The search boxes used throughout the website required denormalizing and aggregating data from different models inside indexes. It also needed to keep track of their dependencies in order to update them efficiently.

Did you manage to implement your solution?

Halfway through my internship we decided to focus on a PoC and see where we could push it. During this second half, I worked specifically on Elasticsearch. I had to code, test, document and present my PoC. I also had the opportunity to talk to other team members on the inner workings of my application layer. The solution hasn’t been implemented in the current application, yet. However, I hope my work will be used in the near future to migrate from the old solution.

Why did you choose to intern at Agorize?

Before Telecom SudParis’ school fair, I had a look at all the companies to figure out which ones I wanted to meet. The very first thing I read about Agorize was “open innovation”, which did not appeal to me very much. I am not really a fan of those catchphrases! However, what really hooked me up was the work environment and, most of all, the people that worked there.

How was your mentor during the internship?

My mentor was very friendly! Zouheir always took time to answer my questions, as all of the other co-workers did. During my internship, I was free to look for my own solutions and present them to my mentor. Being autonomous enabled me to find new techniques I did not know about. We worked together to make sure what I was working on was relevant and that it was what they were looking for.

What pieces of advice would you share with a future intern?

To be curious and willing to discover topics you know nothing about. When you are an intern, you should feel challenged and it’s alright! You’re out of your comfort zone and know very little about the codebase and tools you’re asked to work with. It’s a very positive feeling to see how you evolve through time and get more and more knowledgeable. I learned a lot about some important concepts and patterns in programming such as proxies, serializers, how indexing works and object-relational mappings.

How do you picture yourself in five years?

Coding is something I really enjoy doing in my spare time but I am not sure it will be a right fit for my career. I might end up being a software engineer and evolve towards new responsibilities: project or people management, starting my own company or even switching to a different programming sector all together. If I do carry on this path, I will make sure to pick projects that I feel passionate about that I can easily relate to.