Hiep, from Summer Intern to Full-time Engineer “I really enjoyed the professional and friendly environment at Wolt so I went for it”

Who are you?

Hello there. I’m Hiep Phung. I joined Wolt in April 2018 as a Summer Intern in the Wolt at Work team.

Can you share a few words about your background?

A little bit of a back story…. Back in the day when I had just finished high school in Vietnam, I was in a limbo and didn’t know what I wanted to do. Then I decided to move to Finland to study IT even though I had no idea what it was about. I just grabbed the opportunity because I heard from my friend that Finland has a free education system.After being quite uncertain about things for a while, I finally got hooked on coding when I came across an online course called Introduction to Computer Science (CS50) from Harvard University which took me 13 months to complete. After that I knew software engineering would be my career path.Beside coding, some of my favorite hobbies are watching movies, playing guitar, snowboarding and exploring restaurants on TripAdvisor.

“Back in the day when I had just finished high school in Vietnam, I was in a limbo and didn't know what I wanted to do.”

How did you end up in Wolt?

Like many third year students, I was looking for my first professional job to apply my knowledge and everything I had learned over the past few years to the real world. I had offers from two other companies at that time as well, but I really enjoyed the professional and friendly environment at Wolt so I went for it. I can say that I have made the right decision.

“I was looking for my first professional job to apply my knowledge and everything I had learned over the past few years to the real world.“

What do you do here now?

I work full-time as an Frontend Engineer with the Wolt at Work Admin Portal project. It’s a self-service tool for companies to manage their users, keep track on orders, set up meal policies, download accounting documents etc.

What’s the most interesting technological challenge you have encountered at Wolt?

Redux Saga… Sounds cool but I have no idea yet what it does. We also have some modules written in ReasonML, which I am really looking forward to learning more in the future.

What have you learned during your time at Wolt?

Typescript is a very interesting tech that I have learned at Wolt. It helps us to prevent unnecessary bugs and document our code base. And then functional programming! We do all of our frontend code in functional programming to improve readability and scalability, it has been working great so far. Bonuses: React hooks, styled-components, Storybook, Webpack and Git.

“We do all of our frontend code in functional programming to improve readability and scalability.”

How has it been like in the office?

We have an open space office so you can always peek at what other teams are doing unless they go to private rooms which are weirdly named. For our company events we have a bigger space called Random lounge upstairs. BONUS: we also have a ping-pong table which can be turned into a pool table.