Intern’s experience: From Zamphyr to Gitlab
Ex-intern Đorđe is now a Junior Community Advocate at Gitlab and he talks about Zamphyr’s internship program
We’ve had a chat with our ex-intern Đorđe, who is starting his position at Gitlab as a Junior Community Advocate after his successful internship with Zamphyr. He has worked with us on hacking an API bridge library for Android and experimented with deep integratin with Android accounts. We share a few of his thoughts with you.
Why did you choose Zamphyr for your internship?
Zamphyr looked super attractive. I had no idea if you are extremely demanding as others on the Internet, but the application said you are giving an opportunity to be part of startup to change the technology education as we know it. I bit the bait when I saw that I can contribute to an open-source vision. Remotely, of course.
The first step joining the Zamphyr was very interesting for me because of the application itself. There were many formal questions at the begging of the application form, which could be troublesome if you have no experience. But when you see that first page ending with Star Trek / Star Wars question, you can’t resist going further. That was the moment when I stopped for a while and started researching more about Zamphyr. I read tons of blog posts and watched some videos, which immediately led me back to the application form.
It was important for me that Zamphyr is a remote-only and open source company.
What did you work on during your internship? What have you learned from it?
At Zamphyr, projects for interns are experiments. My initial experiment was to build an Android API library with a showcase app. It is the OAuth2 authorization library to log in with Zamphyr account. I think I learned the most about these terminologies: Web API, RESTful , Google Android library Volley for networking, GSON helper library for JSON, FAN — fast android networking library, Retrofit networking library, Chrome Custom Tab library, Bintray, JCenter, Maven, Ubuntu, Android Studio, Zoom, Slack, and incidentally — GitLab .
What are your impressions regarding Zamphyr’s culture, team and remote work?
The position was completely remote, as everyone in Zamphyr work as a distributed team. The team was also very diverse with people from all around the world, which I think is really amazing, and betters the work atmosphere in many ways. I was satisfied the most with the almost unlimited amount of knowledge you can get from the team. Zamphyr is going to be a open source school, so it’s logical that you can learn about anything you want from the team. They have any resources and help you need. People (mentors and interns) are giving away everything they have, and they are available for you literally 24/7. Of course the fact that it’s remote and open source was my favorite thing as well.
Any advice for future Zamphyr interns?
I want to encourage anyone who is motivated to start. Zamphyr is the greatest place to try first. You will be supported and mentored by whole team 24 hours a day. For real. 4am or 4pm, they are always online for you. That’s amazing! It was important for me that Zamphyr is a remote-only and open source company. I have experience with remote only environments (I am studying remote at Metropolitan University) and I think a lot of personal independence and qualities come with working fully remote. Especially when the whole company is remote — i.e. remote-only.
What are your plans for the future? What’s your next stop?
In meantime, my actions brought me to GitLab. I am hired as Junior Community Advocate. Zamphyr helped me to get through the process of hiring at GitLab. They sent an awesome and super professional reference about me. Also the experience which I got from contributing to Zamphyr enabled me to be competitive candidate for my next role.
Looking for the application? Want more details?
You can read a more detailed story about Đorđe’s experiment on his blog — Adventure at Zamphyr.
You can apply for our internship using our Zamphyr Internship Application Form.
