shopping24 tech blog

s is for shopping

April 30, 2015 / by Conrad Kleinespel / / @kleinespel

6 months at shopping24

I just spent 6 months at shopping24. From July 14th 2014 to December 31st 2014, I was an intern at shopping24 GmbH. I moved from Paris, where I study in the school 42, to Hamburg for that time.

It was my first internship in the IT field. And it was a very rewarding experience. For that reason, I’d like to say what I thought of the internship. Maybe it can help you decide whether you’d like to work at shopping24. Please keep in mind that this is not a paid blog post. I was not required to write this up. I was not fed words either. With that said, let’s get to business :-)

How the recruitment process got me excited

Originally, I got interested in joining shopping24 because of a girl I loved at the time. She lived near, so this was a way to get closer. What’s funny here is that Kim, who was about to become my mentor, had come to Germany for a similar reason: a girl too.

So yeah, that was my first experience getting to know who I would be working with. After a bit more stalking Kim on Twitter and finding this awesome blog about CSS stacking contexts, I was starting to feel like working with him could really be cool.

A few days later, I met Daniel, team lead web development at the time, and Kim over a Skype talk. It was very nice to hear from the developers themselves, not some random HR person I’d never work with anyway. We talked about a variety of things, including the all to frequent nerf gun fights that happen at the shopping24 office (yes, for real).

A few days later, we had agreed to work together, I received the contract and sent it back. I was about to move from Paris to Hamburg for the next 6 months and couldn’t wait.

What it feels like to be an intern at shopping24

Before coming to shopping24, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, the recruitment process seemed relaxed. But still, shopping24 was and is a subsidiary of the huge Ottogroup. With this in mind, I wondered:

  • if the tasks I’d be getting would be fun,
  • if I’d get access to our tools or be blocked by dozens of firewalls, VPNs, security policies and what have you,
  • and if the team would be cool or completely burnt out by productivity requirements.

Well, within the first week, I knew this could be a lot of fun. Granted, I had dealt with a lot of web technologies before joining shopping24, and so I was not a beginner. But…

I was assigned the same kinds of tasks than the rest of the team. Sure, I needed some time to understand the more complex parts of our systems, but if I felt confident enough, I could just “take” the task, put my name on it, and I tried to complete it. Gradually, I went from bug fixing, to feature additions and security enhancements. Without feeling like I was being given the Internship Task ™.

I was given access to all of our code repositories, hosted on Github. This meant I could dig through everything and learn not only about the web part of shopping24 but also about how our API worked or our the operations team setup our server infrastructure. Also, working with Github instead of some old clunky homemade version control system was a real joy.

After a few weeks, once I had proven I was reliable and understood UNIX enough not to mess everything up, I was even given full SSH access to our productions servers. As an intern in a team of 50, getting this kind of trust after 2 weeks is both rewarding and motivating. And sure, I had to earn that, but it felt great.

Finally, I got to meet an awesome team of very welcoming people. They didn’t mind my occasional grammar errors (my German was not 100% caught up yet, as I live in Paris). We had the occasional Thursday evening beer at the office. We even did a team run (5 x 5 km). How’s that for team spirit?

Where’s the negativity?

You’re right to ask. Where is it? Well, quite frankly, I don’t think there is much negative to say about my internship. Here are two nitpicks.

Since the company has to make money, we sometimes had to chose some technology over another. This meant not trying out a new framework every day of the week. This is probably pretty much the same in any company though, isn’t it? The cool thing is that when it makes sense, we actually brought in the new, cool, and most of all useful framework: for example, I introduced the team to Mocha when the time came to write unit tests for one of our JS libraries.

The second nitpick is about time to deployment. When I joined shopping24, our build and deployment system was kind of clunky. We bundled our websites into a phar archive, which was versioned, we moved this on our servers via scp. It was a mess. Since then, we’ve moved to using Ansible, and this feels like a big upgrade. However, at the end of 2014, we still didn’t have automated testing of our webdev codebase. This meant that we often didn’t have enough confidence in our code to deploy changes daily. Thankfully, work on making deployments easier is in progress. This means that things should be getting better.

What’s more?

Now, I could go on about how I introduced the web team to SASS (in part to support IE7, yes :-P), how we built ourselves a crazy Hubot (and contributed back to this open source project) during our Hacking Days or how I got to use Go (and reported a bug in a standard library) to build a test tool.

But in the end, what matters most are the people you’ll be spending your days with for the months to come. From that perspective, I think shopping24 nails it.

In Hamburg sagt man Tschüß!