When you start your internship (and your career), one thing is important: that you get to try, test, make mistakes, and learn in a fulfilling environment. That is vital to get a precious experience you can then use in your next career move, but also to check if a career in software engineering works for you.

So, as interns working in the Tech team of Doctolib, we have decided to collectively write about our learning experience and highlight the benefits of it. In this article, Titouan, Mariem, Agathe, Julie are sharing what and how we learned at Doctolib.

Pair programming & code review to improve on your coding

Titouan — “As an intern, you usually come to a company to learn the job you might apply for at the end of your scholarship. So having the role of a regular junior software engineer, as an intern, is the perfect way to achieve this. At Doctolib, you have several dedicated people you can learn with (both inside and outside the team). There is a culture that encourages learning the technical processes at every level. It is easy for anyone to dedicate time to help and share knowledge with someone else, thanks to flexible schedules and code rituals:

• Pair programming: 2 or more people working together on a feature, this is the greatest tool to help ramping up and it is widely used in the tech at Doctolib
• Code reviews: when anyone request the submission of a feature, the whole team gets to review and make comments on how to improve the feature

Apart from these rituals, there is a possibility to dedicate some time to learning. Just like a regular employee, you are expected to grow and your manager will help you by setting up processes where you define precisely what you want to learn or get better at and then define how to reach these goals.

I also want to mention that the technical environment is conducive to learning good practices:

• There are always ongoing processes to improve the codebase quality and scalability,
• Every feature delivered is thoroughly tested,
• Shipping quality code is a team effort.”

Mentoring and formal learning: receiving practical advice

Mariem: “At Doctolib, you can block slots in your calendar dedicated to learning, and there are a lot of tools available to learn:

• Subscriptions to online learning platforms like egghead.io, ui.dev and FrontendMasters,
• Detailed documentation in Confluence for a variety of topics,
• A learning platform called Uniq put in place by Doctolib offering lessons and exercises to ramp up on the company’s stack (Rails, React, Security, Typescript) and which contains concrete examples from the Doctolib code base.

Besides the tools to make progress, one other part is mentoring.

There’s a mentoring program available for new tech joiners at Doctolib called Starsky & Hutch program. It allows you to find a fellow Doctoliber who is highly skilled at the coding languages you want to learn to be your mentor for as long as you need, so you can have weekly sessions with them to either go through the material on Uniq, or just ask questions and get advice. I find this to be very valuable, especially as an intern, because you receive practical advice on how to be a better software engineer directly from people who spent years honing their skills.”

Agathe: “It is also my 1st experience as a software engineer, so it’s important to have mentors guiding and supporting you. I found a very caring and supporting team. If you ask for help or have any questions, team members are always here to help you and level you up. They consider you as a proper team member. It can be a bit disturbing sometimes because you don’t feel you have the credibility to do it. Indeed, you are not supposed to know everything, you are here to learn and that does take time ! Just be proactive and ask questions when you don’t get it.

I’m personally from Ecole 42, so we worked with a lot of peer coding. Now, we have mentoring from senior devs which is very enriching and interesting. At 42 school we learn by experience and peer-coding, but everyone is a learner, just like you are. So I was really looking for that, to learn also from people who know more than me and can teach me. I found it is a complementary way of learning.”

Support from management to learn & grow

Agathe: “There is a real technical and emotional intelligence in the teams due to a selective hiring strategy based on values, potential and knowledge, but also due to a well structured management team. I’m really feeling that I’m working in a caring environment. I can feel it’s a real wish from the top leader of Doctolib. There is an important management process to help you to get the best of yourself, but also to understand your difficulties and help you go through this:

• As a Tech Doctoliber, you have weekly meetings with your manager/tutor. This meeting is a good opportunity to talk freely to your manager about how you feel, what went well or was not so good. I appreciate this dedicated moment so that we make everything ok.
• Every month they ask you about your motivation, battery, delivery etc. to get your mood.
• Every 3 months, we have the `Quarterly review`, where you talk with your manager about what you think went well, where you should get better or improve and then you define your SMART goals for the next 3 months.

At the end of the internship, if you say you would like to stay your manager will build a « case » proving you do check all the characteristics to become a software engineer level 1, to give proof of all your work you can simply take notes every week of what you did and succeeded. It’s a good way to remember where you come from, all what you achieved and to see your evolution, because it’s so easy to forget.”

Shadowing and Learning on the job: the best way to discover the life of a software engineer

Mariem : “At Doctolib, as an intern you are considered as if you were a junior software engineer. This allows you to sample the daily work they do, and check if this is the right job for you.

Another extremely valuable thing about an internship at Doctolib is getting to be surrounded by highly skilled engineers, and being able to chat with them everyday and get insights on the key elements that helped them with their careers and the advice and guidance they might have for you. Everyone is so friendly and ready to help whenever they can. Talking to people from all seniority levels and getting to know what their day to day looks like can be very motivating and inspiring to someone who is just starting their career, it can also give you an idea of the different career paths available to you as a software engineer.

Doctolib has a “Live My Life” program that allows you to spend up to a week with a different team: as an intern it helps you get a taste of even more different scopes and domains, so you have the possibility to compare and choose what you like best to work in after your graduation → In my case I enjoyed both software engineering and data science related courses in school, so being able to do an internship in software engineering and also test what it’s like to work with data teams helps a lot in getting clarity on what I want to continue in afterwards.”

Encouraging different backgrounds helps the overall experience of learning

Julie: “I arrived at Doctolib from a different background and that wasn’t an issue. The place welcomes different people and there is a strong culture of learning whatever the experiences you had before.’

Agathe: “It was very important for me to get in company where I would not be the only woman or at least in a company that is aware of the parity issue in the Tech field because I believe that whatever the field, diversity is essential to innovate and create but also to improve working relationships and efficiency.”

Agility in the Tech teams: working day by day

Agathe: “We are the 1st promotion of interns in the Tech team. This internship is a great opportunity to discover what is `working as a software engineer at Doctolib` but also to discover the different products and scope teams work on. It was very important for me to have such an opportunity after school, to be able to understand how to get organized on a massive project and code-base.

At Doctolib, Tech teams work with an Agile method, having 3 months roadmaps divided into flexible sprints of 2 weeks on average, which are also divided into smaller tasks. Every morning, we meet for a stand-up meeting with the team and everyone tells what he did the day before, what he is going to do that day, asking for help if any difficulty, for peer-programming for example. This way of working represents well the company that is itself in constant move, we need to be agile in how work is also physically in the teams.

Furthermore there are a lot of internal moves. For example, within 3 months, I changed teams, had two different team managers and a coworker changed to another team as well. Because Doctolib is growing so much, nothing is permanent, many changes are due to many internal opportunities.

Doctolib offers three working modes: full time at the office, hybrid mode with 2 days onsite, or remote with a monthly visit to the office. Without conscious effort, these options could damage team spirit. Instead, every month, every team of the Domain we are part of organizes a Domain Days event, which gets everybody reunited at the office during the same days. We get to know each other better rather than being mostly online. Also, every team can organize a team building roughly every 3 months, which is a good way to build great team spirit. Doctolib is all about being Agile !”

Our advice to future Tech interns at Doctolib:

• Don’t be afraid to apply even if you feel you don’t have all the knowledge required, you will learn while you are at there,
• Once you are in, communicate with your team about what you don’t understand, they are willing to help you,
• Take the time to learn and be curious: there are a lot of dedicated rituals for you to explore and grow!

If you are interested in joining Doctolib, check out this page!

Writers of this article:

Mariem El Majdoubi: Computer Science student at ENSEEIHT school of engineering. Intern at Doctolib from April to September 2022.

Titouan Fiancette : Intern at Doctolib from March to August 2022.

Agathe Géraud: Having a background in luxury marketing, I changed my career for IT by joining the school 42. I ended my course with a 6-month internship at Doctolib.