My Internship Experience at Caylent

For the duration of the 12-week internship, I worked directly under Randall Hunt, the CTO of Caylent. For the most part, my colleagues consisted of his team, but I also had the opportunity to branch out to other groups like the Builder’s team and the Sales team. My workload consisted of shadowing Randall through various sales, pre-sales, migration talks, on-site meetings, and numerous other conferences. At the same time, I was also tasked with working on several projects, such as a financial chatbot, a website migration tool, and a cloud cost management tool. As a result, I gained a broad understanding of Caylent and the tech industry in general.

I came across the opportunity through hackNY, an NYC-based fellowship and community that connects technology interns to the greater NYC technology scene. I was immediately intrigued by Randall’s enthusiasm for the company as well as technology in general. At the same time, I was excited by how open-ended the internship was, based on the idea that I could choose my project and take advantage of the wealth of opportunities, including various meetings, conferences, and more.

My first week at Caylent was also my first week living in NYC. I was nervous not only about making a strong first impression, but also figuring my way around the city. Through the commotion of figuring out the subway and finding the nearest grocery store, I distinctly remember how warm and welcoming everyone was! I remember getting many “Welcome to Caylent!” messages on my first day, and everyone was open to meeting with me for potential projects. Meeting my team for the first time was also a wonderful experience because, though there were many projects going on, everyone was tight-knit and looking to help me out. While Caylent is completely remote, it didn't feel that way. I felt welcomed and prepared because of various onboarding meetings as well.

Financial Chatbot

My first project was a chatbot that could retrieve and break down financial information for financial leaders at the company. This gave me valuable experience working with the business side, specifically the finance team, of the company, and deciphering the features they needed. In fact, the hardest part was understanding all the financial jargon and what exactly that meant I had to do. Getting a seal of approval from the CEO on the chatbot was a cool moment! Through this project, I gained experience working with generative AI, AWS Lambda, serverless architectures, and proper Git hygiene. Victor Santos, Mathias Phoyu, and Ignacio Garnica were all incredibly helpful in helping me find my way.

Website Migration Tool

After that, I created a website migration tool to transition the Caylent site onto another CMS by converting webpages to markdown. This was written in TypeScript with the support of packages such as Axios and xml2js. 

The main hurdle was figuring out how to work with proprietary tags, like code blocks. However, getting feedback and advice from senior members like Jon Spaeth helped me better understand the codebase. For example, I was able to figure out that the code blocks were being rendered client-side instead of server-side. This presented an issue because the data I wanted to find was not being loaded at all. Meetings with Jon helped us to realize that this needed to be fixed to server-side rendering. Once this was done, I was able to easily parse the site and extract the necessary data.

Cost Management Tool

The last project I worked on was a cloud cost management tool designed to track and shut down unnecessary services, thereby reducing wasted costs for the company. A Slack notification would then be sent out to inform users that a service would be shut down. This project utilized various services, including Cloud Custodian to set up policies and minimize costs, as well as AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS. 

However, because Cloud Custodian is an open-source software, there is no dedicated support, and issues are resolved more slowly. When installing c7n-mailer for Slack support, the latest version was missing required dependencies for the AWS Lambda function. The easiest solution was to temporarily roll back to a previous release until the issue was resolved. This was because the latest update had a new bug which was documented, but had not yet been fixed.

AWS Summit NYC Week

The highlight of my time here at Caylent was the week of the AWS Summit in New York. There was so much buzz surrounding the launch of Caylent Accelerate™ and the new AWS updates that were launching. My week started off with Randall being interviewed by The Cube at the New York Stock Exchange. The next day, I was able to attend a customer on-site meeting and gain a better understanding of how sales, product management, and software engineering all come together in a product. On Wednesday, I attended the AWS Summit and gained a deeper understanding of the world of AWS, as well as the numerous companies and products it impacts. My week ended with DevRel Con. I went with Guille Ojeda, and he really helped me understand how developer advocacy falls into an organization. 

Throughout the internship, I also gained experience writing and editing blogs for the Caylent website. Much of what was written centered on events that occurred during the week of the summit. Having this in-person experience gave me the opportunity to better understand what I was writing about and reviewing. I was also able to receive feedback on how to improve my writing and communication for technical and non-technical readers, as well as compliments for what I should continue to do well.