Name: Gianna T.
School: MIT
Role: Software engineer intern
Team: Instagram stories creation
Meta office location: Menlo Park

My starter project was on refactoring mention reshares on Instagram for Android devices. Mention reshares are when someone tags you in their story and you get a message saying that you can reshare the post on your story. I worked on migrating mention reshares to more stable infrastructure so the whole process of adding and editing a mention on your story is more stable and feels like other Instagram story stickers. It involved a lot of file editing related to posting the story, communication with my manager and building upon the existing infrastructure to make a great product.

For my second project, I’m working on stickers for Instagram Stories, which I find really cool because almost all of my friends post on their stories with stickers. For this project, I’ve been collaborating with different team members (and people outside of the team), which has been a huge learning experience for me.

My team has been really amazing and friendly. Our team standups are casual, entertaining and very collaborative; you'd often hear people giving feedback on other's updates, even though they don't work on the same platform (iOS, Android, server, etc). They're also welcoming and helpful whenever I reach out to them with questions, comments or just casual chats. Even though I'm based in Menlo Park and the team is in San Francisco, I've always felt like I'm a part of the team.

For my projects, I generally love working on front-end software engineering because I can "feel" what I've done when I interact with it. Working on such a big product like Instagram while doing front-end for my projects is a huge responsibility for me, but it also makes me feel proud, knowing that millions of people would interact with something that I've worked on.

As I have been working with a huge codebase for this internship, I feel more confident reading through other people's code, building upon it and collaborating with other engineers who have more experience with the codebase. With these skills, I could contribute to an open-source project, integrate myself better in research projects at school and generally, work more effectively in group computer science projects.

It has to be the free food for me — everyday, I'm either making a breakfast burrito at one of the cafeterias or trying out one of the many cuisines they serve for lunch and dinner. In a close second place are definitely the bikes on campus. I've been biking for as long as I can remember so I'm always happy to jump on a bike and cycle around!