Going into my last day at work, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on my previous 3 months at the company. Faithlife is an amazing place to work, constantly winning awards for the best company to work at. The internship program is no different. There are brilliant people all around, major opportunities for growth and fun projects to work on. I would love to give a huge shoutout to David Mitchell, the 13 year veteran of the company, for taking ownership of the intern program! It has been a fantastic learning experience to the point where I have virtually no complaints about the internship. Thanks for making this such a great experience.

The Program

Sixteen years ago, David Mitchell started off as an intern at Logos, which is now Faithlife. Bob Pritchett, the CEO, walked up to his desk on the first day, dropped a research paper on his desk and said "I like this; implement it". This is truly terrifying! As a college student, not having much of an idea of how to code in the real world, David was just had to figure it out—which was a great experience! But, could have been done better. Since then, David has taken ownership of the internship program; it's his goal to give the interns the best experience possible.

Mentors

Every intern is given a single person to mentor them throughout the internship. A single person! My mentor, Erik Lanning, has been an amazing contributor to my learning. Whenever I had a question, he would dropped whatever he was doing in order to help me. I felt that Erik actually cared about my success, even if he was quite harsh on me doing code review. However, Erik is harsh on me during code review because he wants to see me grow. Every comment on Github to rename something came with a nicely tagged article on why, giving me the ability to not repeat the mistake. This helped me grow at an extremely rapid pace during the internship. I believe that all of the mentors were kept to a very high standard by David, which turned out really good for the internship program.

1 on 1's are a really powerful way to give people feedback. As an intern, we're provided with an hour of our mentor’s time solely for feedback, to ask questions and for positive criticism and chat about the experience so far. The words "Max, you're quite sloppy with your code," really hit me like a truck during one week of the 1 on 1s. But I really appreciated the honest feedback! This led to me to more intentional with spacing, variable names, styling, organization, optimizing and much more. I would like to give another huge shoutout to my mentor Erik Lanning for investing 3+ months of time and effort into me. It's been such a great learning experience for me to work on the Faithlife Groups team.

Events

Do you not have many friends in Bellingham? Well, Faithlife has got you covered! They usually have two events per week for the interns. This includes go-karting, hiking, ice skating, escape rooms, boat rides and much, much more. With, of course, Faithlife paying for the event and the food. These events make the interns feel very welcome at Faithlife, giving as an opportunity to fit in and have something to do. The mother of all the events though is definitely the hack-a-thon !

The hack-a-thon is a 24 hour event, where a team must create a new product for the Faithlife brand. The “create”, only means coding in this context. So, design, artwork, advertisement or anything else is really in the ballpark for what can be worked on. At the end of the 24 hours, there are also pitches for the product. During the pitch the interns are the only people allowed to speak and answer questions. By having this opportunity, it gave the interns a chance to speak in front of a large crowd of people, which is a good skill to develop! As with most hack-a-thons, people get really into it, creating a very unique competition.

There are three categories where it's possible to win: awesomeness, shipping and people's choice, where the first two are chosen by a panel of judges. This year, my team won people's choice, and it was such a blast! We put hats on all of the avatars on beta.faithlife.com. Which doesn't seem like a fantastic idea (because it's not), but we were taught that it's all in the pitch. We took a page from the playbook of this crazy guy by doing the dance and all! People enjoyed our pitch, our networking and ultimately us so much that we ended up winning people's choice! I really enjoyed running around to people at the company that I'd never met before and asking for hat recommendations for the avatars. To the left, are my fellow Mad Hatter teammates from the competition.

The rest of the company kicked butt though, honestly. One group built a live transcription of sermons. Which, in itself ended up being quite rad. But, they took it to another level. They then translated the sermons into other languages! This would really reduce the barrier for non-native speakers trying to enter the church. This was just one other example of the 8 other hack-a-thon ideas.

Work Culture

Another fantastic thing about Faithlife is the culture there. Instead of working 60 hours a week to get ahead, we're told to work 40 hours, even less if we don't feel good. The company really cares about the well being of their employees. Faithlife has unlimited vacation days, a paid four week long sabbatical every 10 years and a very calm work environment to demonstrate that they truly do care about the employees health. I believe this is part of the reason so many people at the company will never leave; they really enjoy the work culture.

Coffee Dates

Back in the day, Bob Pritchett, was working at Microsoft, trying to find his way. So, how did Bob, now the CEO, get to where he's at today? Coffee Dates! He would contact people he barely knew, then convince them to go out to coffee with him. Bob would then bombard the interviewee with questions that cannot easily be gauged out by most press interviews. Then, Bob would ask them to hook him up with more contacts. The crazy thing is though, he didn't just meet with tech people; he met with anyone that he found interesting, which includes people at political campaigns, baristas and anyone he found value in. This lifelong learning attitude is one of the many things that has set him apart from the average person.

27 years later, and the coffee dates are still going strong! At the beginning of the internship, each of us was given a $50 coffee card to take employees out to coffee. Further, as an intern, if you're not going on two coffee dates a week, then you're doing something wrong. My coffee dates have ranged from devs, to executives, to marketing... Just all over the company! From all of these these conversations, though, I've made some great friends and obtained some new knowledge that is otherwise difficult to get. I now know more about interviewing (David Mitchell), Powershell and Windows (Mike Estes), security (Elizabeth), how to give good code review (Ed Ball), how to market a product (Jim Straatman) and much, much more. Having this sort of opportunity to learn, through coffee dates, is one major thing I'm going to take away from this internship.

The People

For some reason, everyone at the company is extremely nice and fun to be around! I have never met someone at the company who took joy in pushing me down. Which in today's modern world, is quite astonishing! With coffee dates, scrum, seeing people in the hallway, I always felt part of the Faithlife family from the beginning. Further, the people at this company are brilliant and long term; people love to work for this company. There are so many employees who have been at Faithlife for 10+ years! They have so much wisdom to offer the younger developers; they are also very good about sharing their knowledge. Every single person on my team is a genius in their own right; it's been quite an honor to work with such smart and meticulous people.

Personal Growth

Faithlife feels like a start up environment, even though it is one of the longest standing software companies in the world, being around for 27 years when this article was written. The way they're able to achieve this is freedom for the employees and a focus on personal growth. The employees are encouraged to take initiative over whatever they want; this leads to new products being developed in new ways. Recently, everything on the Faithlife.com project was switched to React, just because someone saw how amazing React was going to be. This passion gave the company a completely new outlook on things. Further points of initiative can be seen in the sheer amount of products now being offered. Back in the day, only Logos Bible software was being sold. Now, though, there's a website builder, content management tool, social media platform and much more on the way. All of these products started because someone took initiative.

As far as personal growth goes, the company is constantly challenging its employees to get better! We're given the opportunity to grow with workshops and classes, such as the Docker talk, reading group meet ups for the interns and the UX class. These sorts of events show that the company cares about the development of their employees; they're definitely willing to invest in people. To further demonstrate that they are willing to invest in people, 50% of the software developers at Faithlife were once interns (which is a quite staggering number). As I mentioned before, 1 on 1's with our direct superiors are a fantastic thing about the company. But it's not just an intern thing! It's a company wide idea; this leads to feedback constantly going from boss to employee and vice-versa. This leads to smarter and better people in the long run.

Another interesting event is read for cash. This program is a way to incentivize people to get outside of their comfort zone and read something new! The shelf includes business, marketing, leadership among other things. Yes, you are literally paid to read! The maximum payout is $300, just for reading a book... So, get reading folks. Faithlife really values the people at the company.

Conclusions

At the end of the day, I would recommend working at Faithlife as an intern; the company has been nothing but truly remarkable to me. Please apply there if you are currently looking for a job. A little tip: They care more about passion and potential than raw skills. So, even if you do not feel you are ready to apply for an internship, just give it shot!

I've truly enjoyed the experience; there's even a high chance of me heading back there in a few years to take the team lead on security. If you want to talk deeper into Faithlife, then please feel free to contact me!