I joined TrendPop (then Stream Report) for ~10 hours/week in my first semester of college. It was my first experience working in a more industry environment even though it was only a total of 3-4 people back then including myself. The goal of the platform was to provide insights about everything happening on TikTok.
The company was founded only a few months before I joined, and the daily active users of the platform was around 60 when I joined.
Highlights
- Accepted into Y Combinator’s W21 batch
- Implemented a producer consumer web crawler
- Extensively utilized docker
- Learned a lot about code maintainability and industry practices
Web Crawler
I learned about then created a producer consumer based web crawler for TikTok that was based on my TikTokAPI python package with a few tweaks for improved data parsing.
This crawler used RabbitMQ to manage running our jobs and used Redis to provide a fast database for managing our job queues. This particular section of the codebase was entirely written in python so I specifically learned a lot about various programs and packages that are designed to make python code more readable across an entire organization.
Code Quality & CI/CD
I learned about and used a ton of technologies during this internship that I had never used before that improved my quality of life a lot such as
- Code linters
- GitHub actions for both continuous integration and continuous deployment
- Kanban-style boards
- Proper branch management
- Docker
- Everything was containerized, and definitely started my passion for containerizing everything
And so much more that I’m definitely forgetting about.
I enjoyed the work I was doing there even if it felt like a lot being in first semester of college while everything was still online because of covid-19. I’m glad I did it and glad to see TrendPop being successful and acquired by Collab.