Intern Spotlight: Michelle Nguyen

As our summer internship program comes to an end, we say goodbye to the 17 LogicMonitor interns who spent the past 10 weeks helping us live out our mission: to expand what’s possible for businesses by advancing the technology behind them.
To kick things off, we sat down with Michelle Nguyen who worked as an Engineering Intern in our Santa Barbara office.

How did you hear about LogicMonitor?

As an Engineering student going into my senior year UC Santa Barbara (Go Gauchos!), it is quite appropriate that I spend my last summer before graduation getting hands-on industry experience. I actually came across LogicMonitor unintentionally. So at my university, I serve as the President of an organization supporting women in Engineering and Science, Phi Sigma Rho. Towards the end of March, a LogicMonitor recruiter contacted me as part of an effort to create partnerships with campus groups. During our conversation, I started researching LogicMonitor and found out about their internship program. I expressed my interest and got called in for an interview — the rest is history!

Tell us about the internship program.

Coming into this internship, I expected to be handed all of the “easy” grunt work from a larger team of engineers — you know, writing test code or refactoring. However, what we actually got was quite different.
The beginning of the internship consisted of a bootcamp to help us become familiar with the tools in LogicMonitor’s technology stack. Honestly, we were like a bunch of newborn chicks running around just trying not to break anything. Here’s a picture of us on the first day!

The subsequent weeks were spent going through a project’s entire software development cycle: understanding the requirements, creating a technical design, implementing through test driven development, testing, deploying, and demo-ing. We worked in 3 week sprints and reported our actions in a daily stand up, which allowed us to get a firsthand look into the life of a Software Developer!
Luckily, all of the software interns got to sit next to each other which was super cool. This created a fantastic environment for collaboration, idea sharing and getting help on common issues without the pressure of feeling incompetent in front of the LM team (take that, imposter syndrome!!).

What project did you work on?

As interns, we were put into teams and received our own projects to build from the ground up. My partner and I were assigned a project to create a new alerting method for the LogicMonitor platform. If you’re reading this, you probably know that LogicMonitor is an infrastructure monitoring platform. And when some part of your infrastructure is down, LogicMonitor sends you an alert. Currently, LogicMonitor delivers these alerts through SMS, phone calls, email, and any HTTP integrated methods (i.e. Slack). Our project was to incorporate push notifications so people can get notified from their desktop. In my personal opinion? We killed it.
Although we signed up to be Back-End Developers, we also ended up being Product Managers and Full Stack Developers. We got a glimpse into the development decision making process and had the opportunity to build an entire project from scratch — from behind the scenes in the back-end to the user experience on the front-end.

What was mentorship like?

We were all under the guidance of the Engineering Manager, Sam Dacanay. Despite his busy schedule, he always made time to answer the interns’ questions. He understood that we were interns, never made us feel incompetent, and treated us all with respect and fairness. Sam is a powerhouse and I’m so grateful he was our manager. LogicMonitor, you’ve got yourself a good one.

In addition, each team was given a mentor to guide them through their project. My mentor, Louis Yang, is an incredibly intelligent and amazing software engineer — we really couldn’t have finished this project without his guidance. Louis was always available to help me with any issues I ran into and was a constant pillar of support and encouragement.

Any final thoughts?

Looking back on this internship, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity that LogicMonitor has provided me. If you’re reading this as a prospective LogicMonitor applicant, I highly recommend applying for their next summer internship program (or even for a full-time position right now!). From strengthening my development skills and pushing the limits of learning to being surrounded by all of the wonderful people at LM … it’s been real. I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time here and will be coming back during the school year to work part-time for LogicMonitor! Catch me around.