COOP1 (May - August 2017)
Learning lots!
To this day, when I look back on my first co-op semester, I still feel incredibly lucky with how well everything went. As my first real job in a professional setting, my co-op with Bonfire at a very fundamental level, taught me not only how to be a software developer but how “working” works. It established my compass of what “good” and “bad” practices are, a bearing I still refer to.
I’ve seen peers who start their career at poorly managed companies with little to no mentorship and it can take several more co-ops to realize and unlearn a lot of negatively instilled habits. The first co-op has the potential to calibrate one’s expectations going forward and I attribute a lot of my later successes to Bonfire and the incredible career and personal growth I had during my short four months there. I can’t think of another time in my career where I developed so much in four months and I’m not sure if there ever will be again.
A key factor in the success of the term was my mentor, the CTO of the company at the time. Though he was incredibly busy, he made time for weekly 1 on 1’s where we would chat about a wide range of topics from personal productivity to learning about how startup funding works. Rarely related to the specific work I had on hand (I talked to the other engineers for help there), these chats essentially were a weekly career development session which soon became the most anticipated part of the week.
In addition to that, the company itself was going through a very exciting growth period as they closed their series A funding during my second month there and by the end of the term, we were in a brand new office with nearly double the headcount of employees. I came away from these experiences with a strong interest in the business side of the tech world and also a small entrepreneurial itch within myself. Of course, the actual work I did also gave me skills in full stack web development, very in demand at the time, that became the backbone for the majority of my future co-ops.
Aside from the job, the semester was also great in a personal sense. Although I was living back in my hometown in Guelph (about a 35min drive commute to work), my parents were away travelling for much of the summer. In a way, my relationship to my hometown was redefined as I was living on my own, cooking and buying groceries, and enjoying the city all independently for the first time in my life. I was surprised how after an entire childhood spent growing up there, how much of Guelph I had barely scratched the surface of. A lot of my memories from this summer blend with memories from high school, university felt as far away as could be. A standard workday evening would consist of working out at the track, cooking dinner on the barbeque in the backyard, eating a huge bowl of food while watching Gotham, and playing some Starcraft UMS games at night. Simple but good times.
Scattered memories:
- Starcraft summer evenings
- Busy Victoria day long weekend
- Bonfire scavenger hunt
- Getting asked “you lift bro?” at work from large lunch portions
- Canada 150th carnival and fireworks
- Y’s wedding
- Hillside festival
- Detroit visit
- Weekends in Kingston
- Bonfire moving to the Tannery
- Pretty sunsets by the boathouse
- SOSI week
Songs:
- Salamandre - Sarah Harmer
- Wait - M83
- Tap Out - The Strokes
- Alturas - Inti-Illimani