SWE @ SmugMug

Summer 2022

TL;DR

I spent 8 weeks in the summer of 2022 as a software engineering intern on SmugMug’s Growth team, working across the stack in PHP, React, and Next. It was my first time inside a large, mature production codebase, the kind real customers are using while you’re editing it.

I gave a presentation on all this at the end of the internship. Here’s the deck:

What a real codebase is like

Before this, I’d written plenty of code, but never inside a system this big with this many people depending on it. What surprised me most was how much structure sits around the actual coding to keep it from falling over.

Every change runs through what the team called a multistage filter. You build it, it goes through pull request review, then QA, then it ships. Nothing reaches production without clearing all of it. At first that seemed like a lot of steps for a small change. By the end it made sense, because one bad change in a codebase that size can break things for a lot of people at once.

The rest of the setup pointed the same way. I had my own sandboxed SmugMug site, a private copy where I could test changes without touching anything real. Work got tracked in Jira sprints. And the code was a mix of modern and legacy, so a chunk of the job was learning to find my way around an unfamiliar codebase and change it without breaking the parts I didn’t understand yet.

What I shipped

Gallery engagement stats. SmugMug shows photographers stats on their galleries, things like how many views and downloads each photo is getting. I added a daily update cadence so those numbers refresh on a schedule, and cleaned up the display so it’s clear what you’re looking at: labeling a window as “last 30 days” instead of just “30 days,” and handling the empty states for photos with no views or downloads yet. Small feature, but user-facing, and I owned it start to finish.

A 404 link in the monorepo. There was an “include your discount code?” link in the frontend that had been pointing at a 404. I tracked down where it broke and fixed it. A one-line change that still went through the full review and QA pipeline, which at the time struck me as excessive and in retrospect obviously wasn’t.

The PHP 8.1 upgrade. On the backend, I worked on changes supporting SmugMug’s move to PHP 8.1 and wrote my own unit tests for them. This one had real stakes. It was on the critical path, so if my piece wasn’t done on time it would have held up the release. It also turned out to be a lot more involved than anyone expected going in, which kept happening to me that summer. I paired with one of the backend engineers, Cabbey, to get it across the line.

What stuck

Writing the code was rarely the hard part. The skill was making changes I could actually be confident in: testing them, pushing them through review, and understanding how my one piece fit into a system I didn’t build and didn’t fully understand. I came in out of my sophomore year of high school mostly wanting to move fast, and this was the summer that beat that out of me.

Thanks

A lot of people made this internship what it was. A few I owe directly: