Employee Spotlight: Yuke Wu, Full Stack Developer

On a regular basis, we talk with our team members about their experience working at Canoe, and their future goals and aspirations. This week, we spoke with Yuke Wu, Full Stack Developer.

What was your internship experience last summer like at Canoe? What made you decide to return full-time?

It was really fun! The summer internship program at Canoe is very well-structured and educational. It not only focused on helping me grow as a developer but also gave me the opportunity to explore cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies such as computer vision. My coworkers were very friendly and always willing to help. In addition to focusing on specific engineering tasks, I also gained exposure to the work of other teams and that helped me understand our product from different perspectives.

I decided to return full-time both because I think developers at Canoe get exposure to many technologies across the stack and my supervisors care about helping me grow professionally. These factors are very important to a junior developer like me.

Tell us about navigating your senior year of college during COVID. What were some challenges? Were there any surprising positives? 

Senior year of college for me involved a lot of adjustments. I think a lot of students can relate to the challenge of not being able to learn from your professors and peers in person. Having club events exclusively over Zoom was also something that took some getting used to. One benefit of studying remotely was the recorded lectures made it possible for me to review them as many times as I wanted. Normally such reviews would have to be based on the textbook, but I found getting it straight from the professor’s mouth helped me grasp the concepts better.

If you have any advice to summer interns this year as they navigate school and looking ahead to full-time jobs, what would it be? 

A lot of interns are going to have to make decisions whether to take their return offer or to look further afield. I think the most important thing to think about is whether they see themselves growing both within and with the company. As for school, a lot of the most interesting and advanced courses were only unlocked for me in my senior year. These courses were a great opportunity to look into further sub-fields of my major. Taking these courses and talking to industry professionals really helped me find what path I wanted to pursue after graduating.

What are you most excited about as you start your career as a full-stack developer at Canoe? 

Last summer I was able to study and contribute to a small part of Canoe’s platform. As a full-stack developer, I’m excited to dive deeper into the inner workings of our product and use both what I’ve learned and what I will learn to improve our product!