Inside Datadog: What It’s Like to Intern at a Top SaaS Analytics Company
By: Isabella Pham
Tags: Internships, Software Development, Technology, Computer Science, Datadog

Day 1 (August 31, 2020): New Hire Onboarding

The first day of work included different onboarding processes and trainings interleaved with generous break times. It was nice since there were three breaks throughout the day after each session and they were an hour long, so the day didn’t feel jam packed with back to back Zoom meetings.

Online orientation that start off with IT set up

This orientation was for all Datadog new hires and not just interns, as the intern orientation would be the next day. Thus, I didn’t meet my fellow interns yet.

Day 2 (September 1, 2020): Intern Onboarding

I really loved how Datadog had an intern onboarding for all the interns to get to know each other! Something I realized in previous remote internships was that it was really difficult to get to know other interns and become friends with them, which was something I really missed.

Because the Fall 2020 intern class had only ~25 interns (while there were 30 interns total as some Summer interns extended their internships into the Fall), it was definitely a lot easier to get to know everyone because rather than trying to know thousands of interns at perhaps a much larger company, there’s a smaller group to easily become friends with.

For the intern onboarding, all interns were asked to create a Google slide with six images to introduce themselves. Then, our recruiter would compile all these slides together into a big presentation for us to get to know each other. My slide (featured below) showed a bunch of different aspects of my life.

The top left is a meal I cooked (as I started picking up cooking during quarantine) which consisted of miso soup, salad with ginger dressing, and karage. The top middle is a picture of me playing badminton as I compete on my university’s badminton team! Top right is a picture of me getting a super awesome quickscope in Fortnite while my friend was spectating me since I love to play video games. Bottom left is my anime keychain collection as I love to watch anime and I collect keychains by ordering them online or buying them at conventions. And the bottom middle and bottom right are my two dogs Lieutenant (the tan Shih Tzu) and Curly (the black Pomeranian).

Having get to know me slides for each intern was super helpful in becoming friends with interns because we could find common ground for us to bond over. For example, many of my co-interns and I found out that we’re all fans of the manga Berserk, so we could talk about it with each other and discuss recent chapters (albeit, we couldn’t do this often as Berserk is often on a hiatus…).

After intern onboarding, there was one more onboarding I had to do the next day which was engineering onboarding. This was for all new hire software developers (full time and intern) to learn about joining the Datadog organization on Github, learning more about the Datadog product, etc… With this completed, I could finally start learn more about my team and what I’ll be working on during my internship!

Day 5 (September 4, 2020): Intern Lunch Event

Datadog has done a great job trying to have remote events during the internship and this was the first of them! They reimbursed all interns $30 for lunch (breakfast for west coast interns or dinner for Paris interns) and scheduled a Zoom call for us all to relax and talk to each other while we eat lunch.

I was able to get a really nice bowl of Poke with the meal reimbursement and it was a solid 10/10.

Poke bowl with tuna, salmon, white rice, edamame, scallions, tobiko (small fish roe), pickled ginger, sesame seeds, furikake (rice seasoning mix), nori (seaweed), onion crisps, tempura crisps, and topped with ginger ponzu and eel sauce

Day 16 (September 15, 2020): Pushing out Code

On Friday September 4 and 11, I actually got to push out code to my team’s repository. This really shocked me cause I pushed out code in the first two weeks of my internship, which shows how fast paced working at Datadog is. Not only do you work at a faster pace, but interns have a greater impact. I saw myself contributing to my teams actual code base instead of spending the duration of my internship working on a project that has nothing to do with what my team does.

Pushing out code at Datadog was interesting because my team works on an open source repository, so there were a lot of additional protocols I had to do when pushing out my code. While in my previous intern projects I just had to test my code with one set of testcases, open source projects require you to test code with multiple sets of testcases, as individuals could be using different versions of a library or Python. Thus, you have to test different combinations of Python and library versions to make sure that all of them work with your code. To do this, I had to write the testcases and learn how to use tox to automate the testing process.

Then with my code tested, I added the testcases to the CircleCI test pipeline (which tests code whenever you push it to the repository) and then made a pull request to update the repository with my code. For my code to be reflected in the repository, it has to be peer reviewed, pass CircleCI tests, and I have to merge it with the code in the master branch to resolve any overlapping changes. While pushing out code had some similarities to private projects, there were many differences when working with open source projects.

Day 17 (September 16, 2020): Escape Quest

I’m so glad that there were actually intern events during the internship, and unique ones that I didn’t realize existed. Datadog scheduled an escape quest for all of us to do through the company Confetti and it exceeded my expectations. An escape quest is basically like an online escape room where you have to solve a series of puzzles and make it to the end.

Confetti only allows 5 people maximum per team so there were 5 teams with 3 people each. We all tried to compete with each other to reach the end of the puzzle the fastest. The website for the puzzle had a really nice UI and what was really cool was that the puzzle wasn’t confined to the Confetti website itself. To find the answers to the puzzle, there were times where you had to surf the web on Google Maps, Instagram, and more.