For my 12 weeks on Stripe, I was a crew member of the Connect Platform Billing and Monetization team which covers a whole breadth of work across domains across the company. My responsibility for the summer was the GA (General Availability) launch for our team's new and highly-asked for Platform Pricing Tools product. This task entailed fullstack development in the Connect Dashboard and thorough feature testing along with collaboration with our Product Manager.
When I started the project, there was a working implementation of the platform pricing tools product, but it had been developed by many different engineers over a couple years. My first task was to spin up on the whole project and and to understand the entire tech stack. I learnt that there were many places of duplicate, redundant, and unused code (it would be my final task to clean that up). Something that one doesn't learn coding in college is how to sift through that code and figure out how to distill the important parts and understand the machinery. I believe I improved that skill greatly over the course of the summer.
Eventually, I began implementing new features and consolidating the different versions of the product that existed. This involved learning a lot about the use cases, and the specific needs of our clients. I found that aspect - connecting business needs to specific product details - of my project highly valuable.
As I think about returning to Stripe next summer and the things I would change or focus on more are the following:
- Taking ownership and bringing my own ideas onto the table as much as possible.
- Digging deeper technically, not just to the level of being able to accomplish my task, but really understanding why and how something works.
- Meeting loads of new people and spending more time building connections and learning about what others are working on!