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.
Interview
How did you get into in Computer Science?
There was someone in town who was paying me to teach their kids CS so I taught myself since it paid really well. I was good at math and it seemed reasonable to me at the time! My mom also read about GirlsWhoCode so I started taking on of their programs. I then worked as an intern an Etsy where I got to live in New York City by myself and I really liked that the company was mission driven.
What made you choose Apollo?
Well before the first time I interned here the recruiters that I met at MIT were super kind and competent and interested in myself as a person! Talking to the employees at Apollo helped a lot! The reason why I came back for a second internship was because there was no place that was better (Apollo is great!) It’s really rare to find a company where everyone is super kind and intelligent and on top of their game.
What was it like working on commercial products?
I always liked working on commercial products. In fact I have ever only worked on commercial products. I find it to be a very tangible contribution. Since I’ve been here, at least 50% of the site has been redesigned so that was really interesting and cool to witness. I also worked on some things for federation like adding the service list and it was really awesome to see how the tooling connects to federation which makes the story very clear.
What’s a unique challenge you worked on this summer? How did you overcome it?
I’m not someone who likes reading documentation. Especially since I like to work really fast. To be honest, everything is a little bit of a challenge. I overcame this by writing Quip docs for big designs and that was really helpful for me to unblock myself. I never had conflicts in the workplace before but I overcame it with clear communication.
Did you discover any new passions this summer?
I’m continuously shocked by the javascript community and how robust it is.
What surprised you the most about the team?
Everyone is really kind! Things changed because have scaled compared to the first summer when I was here but things are still somehow also the same. Communication is a little bit different this year because it’s harder now that there are more people who are invested in things that you are working on!
What piece of advice would you give to next year's summer interns?
My advice would be to take advantage of how open people are! If there is something you’d like to work on just ask someone and there will surely be a space for it. Go out and enjoy San Francisco! Oh and read the GraphQL book!