Interns

Jason joined the open source team this summer where he had the opportunity to work on the VSCode extension and touch a few parts of the Apollo Graph Manager. He became a hero in the open source community as he worked through the issue threads in GitHub and addressed bugs that community members expressed real concerns about! Not having any experience with GraphQL before, Jason mastered it in no time just by reading the Learning GraphQL O’Reilly book! After establishing himself in the client world, he made significant improvements to the client developer experience when using Apollo VSCode.

Maya joined the platform team a second time because she believed that there was no better place to work at than Apollo! Maya began her summer by hitting the ground running, building out a complete redesign of Apollo Graph Manager’s navigation. Not stopping there, Maya launched into a brand new theme at Apollo: Graph federation. She built out several core UI experiences to help users better visualize how their distributed infrastructure was working together. Along with her contributions to federation, Maya contributed to Apollo’s open-source, collaborative design system, Space Kit, which you can check out here: https://github.com/apollographql/space-kit. To round it all out, Maya was a core part of the delivery team for migrating our accounts system to include first-party account creation, building up experiences for managing organizations within Apollo Graph Manager.

This summer was Felipe’s first time building consumer products, and he worked across both front-end and back-end, contributing new services into Apollo’s infrastructure and building UI to support core experiences within Apollo Graph Manager. Felipe was surprised to learn how much he enjoyed building front-end components and the challenges that come with thinking through user experience. Throughout Felipe’s time, he worked hand-in-hand with multiple members of the team, ranging from UX designers to core systems architects. His work ranged from creating a cron job to ensure user API keys were up-to-date and accessible to building a user management UI for customers to manage their organizations.

During Helen’s time on the infrastructure team, she contributed not only to improving the services we run and tackling a brand new feature, but she also helped improve our open source Apollo server! In her first few weeks, she built a highly requested open-source feature allowing users to have more control over their security, and worked closely with customers to define the right experience. Helen took on the challenge of understanding two different code bases, mastering both TypeScript and Kotlin, which were both new languages for her! She was able to tackle long-standing tech debt on the team and work cross-functionally to start prototyping a new feature around role based access control. While at Apollo, Helen discovered that her passion lies within consumer-facing products — understanding what the user’s wants and needs are helps her feel motivated and empowered.

Jackson came to Apollo after a summer working on Microsoft’s VS Code, and helped contribute to our open source offerings. One of Jackson’s first contributions was creating a seamless and automatic update experience for users running a distributed GraphQL layer. Jackson experimented with snapshot testing, made critical improvements to the VS Code extension, implemented schema roll-over functionality for the Apollo Gateway, integrated Apollo Gateway within Apollo Server and added polling of Apollo Graph Manager, and took on the herculean task of re-writing graphql-js in Typescript! Being part of the most distributed team, Jackson collaborated with engineers in Helsinki, Amsterdam, South Carolina, and New York! Way to go, Jackson!

Josh joined the infrastructure team this summer where he took on the role as our primary site reliability engineer. He worked on making terraform easier to use internally and created a database migration tool that allowed Apollo engineers to seamlessly roll out new database changes. Not only did he work on internal developer tools, but he also got exposure to our on-call rotation and was on the front line of defense against outages! Before joining Apollo, Josh didn’t know what an SRE was, but after experiencing this new role first hand, he discovered a passion for building infrastructure that not only works, but is also reliable! After enjoying his internship so much, Josh decided to continue his internship into the fall! You go, Josh!