Fastly Summer Interns: Making an Impact

After launching the first-of-its-kind internship program last year, we decided to host another twelve trailblazers this summer! We offered challenging, impactful, and educational projects that would immerse these students in their work and give them experience for their future careers. 

We are so proud to have had all of these incredibly talented individuals be part of our company. With that in mind, we couldn’t be happier with their contributions, so we wanted to share a little bit about them with you all – check it out!

Meet the 2024 Intern Cohort

Abraham Kwok - The Observability Team

Summer project: This summer, Abraham worked on the Observability team where he built a verifier for log insights – an incredible asset to ease the woes of monitoring the logging of sites without having to manually check it. API response characteristics will be able to be monitored directly. This project helps our team provide our customers with an even better and more reliable product. 

Advice for future interns: “Don’t be afraid to reach out to others for help. Everyone at Fastly has been so helpful – there’s no judgment! Enjoy the time you have here, it’s been a great learning experience, and not all companies may have such a supportive environment.”

Athene Marston - The Edge Protocols Team

Summer project: Athene was on the Edge protocols team working on making Fastly more efficient. She worked on an internal tool that will be leveraged by our engineering team to assist them in debugging connections. Athene created a tool that lists every single connection on a node, where it may have been forwarded to, timestamps, and lists requests chronologically. This enables our team to work faster and more efficiently when an error may occur.

Advice for future interns: “At the beginning of your internship, give yourself some grace and allow yourself to not know things. You’re here to learn! By the end, you’re going to have your mind blown by how much you’ve accomplished and learned.”

Blake Marshall - The Cloud and Container Services (CCS) Team

Summer project: Blake had the opportunity to work on two projects on the Cloud and Container Services team. The first was to improve the onboarding experience for engineers consuming our Kubernetes platform. The second was to reduce the toil in managing ingresses for services running in our Kubernetes platform. This included creating a dashboard for our engineers that helps remove the guesswork from monitoring ingresses. It provides alerts on vulnerabilities, updates as things are fixed, and can be easily “set and forget”. He also worked on removing a lot of manual effort when applying allowances to ingresses controlling traffic.

Life @ Fastly: “There’s so much I’ve learned this summer at Fastly! I’ve learned a lot (and still a lot more to learn!), but the people at Fastly are incredibly smart and helpful – they’ve been a big help. I’ve had the opportunity to pick up a lot of really cool knowledge (like containers and Kubernetes) that felt really intimidating before my internship.”

Blayde Omura - The Traffic Management Systems (TraMS) Team

Summer project: Blayde helped bring a bit more visibility to Fastly! He was on the traffic management systems (TraMS) team and worked on Network Error Logging (NEL) which can provide valuable insights into network issues. Using Terraform, he created infrastructure as code and was able to build a NEL pipeline to see connection errors. 

Advice for future interns: “Ask questions! You’re never asking too many questions. People at Fastly genuinely want to hear from others and ask questions. Don’t go through it alone!”

Emerson Kahle - The Cache-D Team

Summer project: Emerson's project with the Cache-D team was on Cache-Trace focusing on reducing time to resolution. His work will also provide valuable insights to our engineering team about where issues are and where they originate from and allow our team to replicate errors more easily. This will help our team build more robust solutions due to enhanced visibility and more.

Life @ Fastly: “I’m incredibly thankful to all the mentors (shout out to Monique Barbanson!), engineers – really everyone here at Fastly. Everyone has been incredibly generous with their time and resources. It’s been a great experience being part of the Fastly squad this summer! I can tell a lot of time and thoughtfulness went into curating this program.”

Esther Kim - The Data Logging Team

Summer project: Esther helped the team create a new version of the sender and the testing framework to show/quantify performance in comparison to the current sender. This eliminated a lot of unnecessary buffers, increased throughput, and decreased CPU usage. Her project will allow teams across Fastly to be more proactive with the new data they will receive in regard to how customers and users engage with Fastly services.

Life @ Fastly: “I had a blast coming into the San Francisco office and hanging out with my fellow interns and other Fastlyans! It was a great opportunity to meet new people and collaborate with others who weren’t on my direct team. I even had a chance to go to NYC with the Data Logging team!”

Eva DeThomas - The Monetization Team

Summer project: Eva worked with the Monetization team this summer and had a unique project working with fellow intern, Taylor. Together they worked on relieving managers from manual efforts when it came to tracking and allocating resources. This assists team leaders with the ability to forecast and predict more accurately.

Advice to future interns: “Ask as many questions as possible. People really want to help you at Fastly, and if you ask questions and put in the work you’ll get a lot out of it! The internship is what you make of it, put in as much effort as you can. Take things as they come, try not to stress that you don’t know everything yet. Communicate your learning journey with your manager. Communication is super important!”

Joshua Agubata - The NetOps Team

Summer project: Joshua had the opportunity to get a lot of first-hand experience with Python and building databases. His main project this summer was creating a centralized location where other networks can “peer” with Fastly at no extra cost. Previously, requests were made through emails (and other methods), it was very formal, and a lot of information needed to be shared. Now users can simply go to a website with all the information they need and do it easily! Employees will also have an easier time managing these tasks with new and improved storage – keeping everything in one place and giving back valuable time to our engineers!

Advice for future interns: “It’s really important to engage and talk with people – not just those that are part of the internship. You’ll get to know more about yourself and others by opening up and having conversations with others. You may also have more in common with others than you know!”

Lidia Perzyna - The Domain Services Team (TLS)

Summer project: Lidia had the opportunity to really dig into the day-to-day life of a team member on the Domain Services team! Not only did she jump into a few tickets that the team had been working on, eager to give a hand on outstanding tasks, but she also took on several full-stack projects. These projects included cleaning up a legacy code repository, creating a new API endpoint to allow for better interactions with customers, and making important improvements to UI, replacing an older module with a new and improved side component module.

Advice for future interns: “Ask questions! No one wants to ask a dumb question but there isn’t a dumb question that you can ask. Speaking up and asking questions may be able to help others on the team or in the greater org. It helps to create a welcoming environment and keeps the conversation alive or sparks a new one! There’s definitely a positive impact in it.”

Mara - The Varnish Team

Summer project: Mara spent the summer learning all about Varnish and working on optimizing older code. They had the opportunity to act as a “doctor” for some of our code, using various tools and to get a better perspective on what is currently working and what can be improved, through thoughtful tinkering Mara was able to optimize this code and improve its performance.

Life @ Fastly: “My summer at Fastly has been a dream! I have felt so welcomed and supported by everyone from recruiters in my interview process to my incredible mentor (shout out to Dylan Hardison!). I love the energy and excitement from all the Fastylans, people who are excited about the tech and making the internet a better place!”

Norman Reyes - The API Services Team

Summer project: Norman was on the API Services team, learning about DDoS attacks, load management, load shedding, and circuit breaking. He made significant contributions to improving Fastly’s resilience to help ensure that we have better control over any unprecedented situations. He optimized and created new routing to prevent invalid requests from getting mixed in with good requests and overloading the server. A major impact for all our customers!

Life @ Fastly: “I have three words to describe my summer at Fastly. Terrific. Exciting. Enjoyable. This is my first internship and this is definitely a company that I could see myself at in the future. The culture here is great, and you can really tell that Fastly doesn’t just talk the talk. It’s been awesome to be part of a company that is doing so much with cutting-edge tech.”

Taylor Rohovit - The Monetization Team

Summer project: Taylor was the other half of our dynamic duo working with the Monetization Team this summer. She worked with Eva on updating features for Fastly administrators and managers who are forecasting the work of their department for the quarter. These updates greatly improve an effort that previously was time-consuming and less accurate.

Advice to future interns: “Be confident. It’s really easy to feel like you don’t belong, or other people are smarter than you… but you were picked for a reason! Be confident. Keep learning. Be comfortable with yourself and give yourself a pat on the back.”

Supporting Tomorrow’s Engineers

We are thrilled to provide this up-and-coming group with a structured and impactful summer internship. Over the past few months, this amazing group had the opportunity to gain practical experience and make a significant contribution to Fastly’s customers, employees, and the wider community. Interested in joining the Fastly team? Let’s build a better internet together!