At Cockroach Labs, we believe that investing in early career talent is crucial for the long-term success of our company. Our first cohort of interns joined Cockroach Labs in 2016—just a year after we officially became a company, and many have gone on to be integral members of our technical staff!
I feel like I learned more at Cockroach in four months than I even did at school.
— Jasmine Sun, Winter 2024 Intern
We’re delighted to feature Jasmine Sun’s experience on our SQL Foundations team. Jasmine is currently an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo and joined Cockroach Labs for the Winter 2024 Cohort. We sat down with Jasmine to talk about CockroachDB, cats, and her tips for applying to our software engineering internship program.
How would you explain CockroachDB to your grandmother?
Imagine a magical set of notebooks, where whenever you write something in one of them, any sort of data, the writing magically appears in all your other notebooks. So even if one of your notebooks gets damaged in a fire or whatever, it doesn't matter. You still have everything safely stored in all your other notebooks, and this just makes your notes and your writings secure and resilient.
Ownership and Mentorship at Cockroach Labs
The above image is from Jasmine's internship presentation. While at Cockroach Labs, Jasmine worked on a number of projects including node-level sequence caching. During her presentation, Jasmine illustrated node-level sequence caching with her love of cats: Multiple sessions (cats) share a single cache (food bowl) of sequence values, reducing waste compared to session-level caching where unused values in individual sessions couldn't be accessed by others.
What was your favorite part about working at Cockroach Labs?
Cockroach gave me the chance to really work on an impactful feature from end-to-end. It was such a unique experience to build something that one of our biggest clients was asking for because I feel like most companies would never even let an intern come anywhere near something of such importance.
I experienced the entire development cycle from writing design docs, to the implementation and testing. I learned a ton of SQL lingo and got hands-on experience with concepts like concurrency and distributed systems. Despite starting with pretty minimal knowledge in some of these areas, it was amazing to not only learn them, but also implement them over the course of just four months.
I owe a huge shout out to Faizan Qazi, for being the most incredible mentor throughout my entire internship! I remember I wasn't super familiar with concurrency prior to this internship, and he sat down with me and whiteboarded this entire lesson about it, to help me with my project. Having such an amazing and supportive guide made my work so much more enjoyable and my internship experience even better!
Author's Note: At Cockroach Labs, mentorship matters! That’s why we pair every intern with an intern mentor—someone who’s there every step of the way. Mentors support interns as they get familiar with CockroachDB, navigate being a member of our engineering team, help with code reviews, and provide feedback throughout the internship.
What was the most surprising thing you learned during your previous internship?
As for the most surprising thing I learned during my internship, I was really impressed by how much the different teams collaborate at Cockroach Labs. I was on the SQL Foundations team, and we worked cross-functionally with the SQL Queries team quite often. It was cool to see and made me realize how interconnected our roles are in delivering a successful product.
Looking ahead, what are you most excited about?
I'm looking forward to building on what I learned during my internship about distributed systems and database technology. I feel like I learned more at Cockroach in the four months than I even did at school.
One of the things I love about Cockroach Labs is that the company is always innovating and scaling. There are always new challenges to tackle, and that keeps things exciting for me.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to intern at Cockroach Labs?
My advice is to really focus on building a strong foundation in your fundamentals - think data structures and algorithms, and also gaining hands-on experience through internships or personal projects. I think it's also helpful to learn about areas relevant to our products, think stuff like distributed systems, SQL processing, and cloud-native applications.
Cockroach University is also a great place to learn about these topics. Familiarity with Golang is a nice bonus too. But, most importantly having a genuine passion for our product, our mission, and writing great code is already an amazing start.
Author's Note: From the website—Cockroach University is a free online learning platform for CockroachDB. We cover distributed databases, cloud-native applications, general purpose SQL databases & much more!
Consider joining our team!
Jasmine’s experience at Cockroach Labs exemplifies the core values of our internship program: ownership, impact, and continuous learning. Our interns join our engineering team as fully embedded members of our technical staff, working alongside their mentor and the team members on their starter projects.
We’re committed to providing a supportive environment where interns make a real difference in the future of CockroachDB. We’re excited by the insights undergraduates bring to our engineering team - and if this excites you, we’d encourage you to apply to our program!
This article was authored by Leslie Niiro, Recruiter, Cockroach Labs.
