Summer Internship Experience at Microsoft

My work and experience with the Outlook team at Microsoft Bangalore

In this article, I will mainly talk about my internship experience at Microsoft Outlook, what I worked on, what I learned, and some highlights. To read about how I secured the internship, you can take a look at this article.

Contents

1. My Work at Microsoft
2. Timeline -A Typical Day at Microsoft
3. Highlights of the Internship
4. Pros and Cons of Remote Work
5. Learnings
6. Pictures!

Microsoft

My Work at Microsoft

I interned with Microsoft for 2 months from May ’21 -July ’21 as a Software Development Engineering intern. I was alotted the Outlook Calendaring API FC team in Bangalore for the duration of my internship, which was remote. My project was structured mainly around the modernization effort of the Outlook platform where the main aim was to transfer the entire codebase and workflows from a monolith to microservice architecture. Some proven advantages of microservice architecture -

1. Clear separation of business logic
2. Reduced build time
3. Faster deployment

In the modernization effort, my work revolved around 2 aspects -

• Adding telemetry to the traffic splitter which divides user traffic between Substrate legacy code and the modern Platform code
• Modernizing the reminder feature of the ReadEvent API in Outlook Calendar

I had the opportunity to work with not only the team based out of Bangalore, but also the Redmond team involved in the same, including senior SDEs, APMs, and engineering managers. It was a great collaborative experience for me, being able to work with such a cross-functional and diverse team, which just goes to show the amount of exposure and potential to make impact that even an intern has atMicrosoft.

Timeline -A Typical Day at Microsoft

Owing to the massive codebase and various functionalities required to be set up prior to the internship, it takes nearly 1–2 weeks to ramp up, acquire all the permissions, understand the codebase, and familiarize yourself with the languages. Most of my project had to be done in C#, which was a language I had never worked with before. Apart from that, I also had to be adept with the legacy codebase and the platform codebase, since the work I had to do was bridging the two. Luckily, there were a total of around 7 interns in our team and along with our super-helpful mentors, we were able to get onboard pretty quick. Post the intern orientation and ramp-up, the actual work began.

You can more or less set your own realistic targets along with your mentor, and work toward them everyday. I had short standup meetings with my mentor around every 2 days, and caught up with my manager with proper updates around every 2 weeks. We were encouraged to reach out to other engineers and product managers across Microsoft if we needed any information and interact with them personally, which also helped me network and learn from a wide variety of people and take their opinion on my work. On an average, I spent around 5–6 hours daily on my project and all things Microsoft. My co-interns and I used to meet nearly everyday for a little fun and game sessions, and got to know each other pretty well.

Highlights of the Internship

1. The best part about my internship were my co-interns, who made the entire thing a lot of fun, and also were a support system throughout the internship. We were easily able to debug issues and test code together instead of waiting to hear from our mentors, and also had regular chit-chat and games sessions which were very wholesome :)
2. Due to the intern cohort in my team being able to almost complete the modernization effort for the ReadEvent API, we were given the opportunity to present to the Partner Director of Engineering at Outlook, Microsoft and our Principal Engineering Manager, and actually showcase our work and their impact on users. It was an amazing experience and I learnt a lot from our team in the process of preparing for the presentation and talking about my work.
3. For the World Intern Day that was held online for all Microsoft interns around the world, there were a ton of mind-blowing performances by top artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Zedd, One Republic, comedians, bands, influencers, and motivational speakers, which were culturally inclusive as well. The cherry on the cake was the Q&A with Satya Nadella, where I had an opportunity to interact with the CEO himself and ask him about the principles he followed to get where he is today, the answer to which was enlightening yet humble and sincere. You can watch the clip here!
4. Interacting weekly with Nicola from Sydney through the Intern Networking Program! She was so cool and always gave great advice and help for any and every roadblock I was facing. Thank you Nicola!
5. Throughout the internship, we received a ton of goodies and Microsoft swag, along with a veritable cartel of handpicked books which were just a treat. 💛

Pros and Cons of Remote Work

The amount of freedom in choosing how exactly to spend your day is much more in a remote setting, and also increases your overall productivity while simultaneously providing you a better work-life balance. However, I personally felt a bit hindered by not being able to interact face-to-face with my mentor, manager and co-interns. The limited access to personal communication makes it a bit difficult to establish relationships, and can also sometimes make you feel isolated. However, Microsoft tried its best to enable interns to have as enriching an experience as it is offline through various events, interactions and games, which went a long way in improving the entire experience.

Learnings

• C# from scratch
• Interaction and coding in an existing large codebase
• gRPC, protobuf, .NET framework, REST APIs
• Debugging and testing methods
• Video animation and editing (part of the presentation made to the managers -you can find the video Sahil and I made here!)

Check out my LinkedIn post on this or feel free to reach out to me via the same for any queries!

Pictures!

Goodies!

Microsoft World Intern Day!

Outlook Calendaring API FC Interns Farewell