Deval Sethi

I’m Deval Sethi, a Computer Science undergrad from Poornima College of Engineering, Jaipur. I’ve always enjoyed working on the backend and working on scalable systems since I was in my second year because I want to make a difference and leave an impact on millions of users. Working on Dailyrounds/Marrow provided me with a mature product with millions of doctor aspirants surfing it regularly made me apply at the company.

This year (2021), I interned at Dailyrounds/Marrow under the tech team in the financial services industry from January to June this year. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and expand my skill set in backend engineering. I’m glad I made this decision because it exposed me to so many new things and allowed me to immerse myself in a wide variety of experiences.
The Beginning of the journey!

From the beginning itself, my journey was terrific and exciting. I was welcome with an open heart from the whole tech team, and even a total 30 min meet dedicated to my introduction, where I got to introduce myself, and the entire team introduced themselves to me. I learned that the people here are not just some nerdy engineers, but they are cool and passionate people with a wide variety of hobbies. There were many inductions to understand the whole business and the product like Sales and Marketing, QBank, and Tech inductions.

The daily work

Unlike other companies where a person gets to work on a specific part of the product, I had the flexibility to work on all the company's flagship products, namely: Dailyrounds, Marrow, and IDI. Here we were also assigned tasks that are directly used by the products, and no sidelined assignments were given that are usually given to interns at other companies.
My primary project was to migrate all Python2 code (including celery tasks and main source code) to Python3. It was a task anyone at my age would crave to get his hands on because of its associated learnings.

I got to look and understand the complete source code and all the bits and bytes of the logical pieces that made Dailyrounds/Marrow what they are today. I learned immensely through this task and in the process. I learned many tools and packages that we used in the production like Flask, Proxys, Encryption/Decryption, Celery, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, etc.
Here you also get the total freedom to opt-in for other projects that excite you, and no one will be stopping you if you are willing to take ownership of that task. Here ownership is encouraged at the fullest; that is why there’s a saying: “At Marrow, no one is an employee.”

There were daily meetings with mentors and weekly meetings with CTO itself, Priyaank Choubey. We have to meet weekly targets as discussed in the weekly catch-ups. Here we got a lot of motivation and knowledge sharing from Priyanka. He motivates everyone and also provides proper feedback so that we can get better week by week.

Features of the Internship:

1. Work Culture — “Learning Ingrained.”

Learning is ingrained in every step of Dailyrounds. Here everyone will encourage you to keep learning and take up projects you aspire to, which you want to work on and learn.

As soon as I joined Dailyrounds, we were asked to purchase courses that we aspire to learn and complete through the internship. My mentor and CTO always encouraged us to be innovative and take up tasks and projects to learn or become competent at the skill and no redundant tasks. You can be choosy in selecting your tasks here!

2. Mentors

Every intern at Dailyrounds/Marrow is provided with a mentor. A mentor is a person who will be looking after your projects and guiding you with anything that you would require to help out with your work. You will mostly be in touch with your mentor, and he will be assigning you tasks. They assign one of the best engineers here, and I have learned many tools and technologies with the help of my mentor. I would not be able to complete my work without the help and guidance of my mentor. I am glad that I got one of the best mentors out there: Om! :)

3. Not just work but a lot more

Yeah, you heard it right! It is not just about work at Dailyrounds/Marrow, but they have a lot more to offer! Following are some of the things that you will experience here:

1. Security Hackathon

Security Hackathon is a 24-hour non-stop one-of-a-kind hackathon! A security hackathon is organized quarterly to ensure that there are no loopholes left in the product. You will be assigned a team and a focus area of the application in which you need to do whatever it takes (really) to get something out from the application!

2. Bug Bounty

At Dailyrounds/Marrow, we keep security as our topmost priority and always welcome and reward the persons who can report a bug of any kind. Also, not to mention the huge rewards associated with it! :)

3. Marrowthon

No, I haven’t misspelled it, but it actually is called “Marrow”-”thon” because of its offerings. You will be assigned to teams, and you have to build real-world products or solutions in 3–4 days. You will be learning many things through this, like faster app development, team coordination, attached focus, and many more.

4. Team Bonding and Creativity

At Dailyrounds-Marrow, we believe that Team stands for:

T — Together
E — Everyone
A — Achieves
M — More

Here they mean this abbreviation and have taken their teams to the next level. Everyone here is friendly, funny and open to talking. I also have made many friends here to which I can talk about anything and not just work. I didn’t believe it when I found out that they arranged a 1-hour meeting for the whole tech team to listen to the intern’s experiences here.