"It's been a great summer with Lexity" - Peter Prime, UCB (Intern, 2012)

Peter joined us from UCB this year. We call him Peter Prime - because we already had a Peter at the company when he joined us!

Intern Extraordinerd Prime: Peter Zhenghao Qian

Coding mania. Enjoys maths, loves music and films, plays saxophone and basketball.

---

Hi Everyone!

I did 4 projects during the internship. 

First, I abstracted the scripts instrumenting merchants' page. Before, all the scripts (like google analytics, google conversion) were hard coded, which means we serve the scripts no matter what. In my implementation, scripts are now served based on what apps the merchant has installed. I abstracted the code out, and made the NodeJS-based serving infrastructure app-ready. 

The second one is making the product images appear on Lexity Live and the titles and images clickable (except cart page). On the backend, it required me to make some extra queries into the database from NodeJS server, which is quite handy for me. However, I need to learn some frontend skills by myself because this also involves with changing how Lexity Live looks like radically. I bugged Barry and Jeanie a lot about the design and learned a lot by myself to make things from specs. Also, it now does some simple checking on the urls so that all pages except cart page are clickable. I'm very proud when I saw my changes to Lexity Live actually were pushed into production. 

The third one is Quick Chat, a project I took over from Patrick. I integrated his code of Quick Chat with my product images changes and also did a lot of cross-browser testing. It's my first time trying to improve some code to production level. I realized how much extra efforts need to be done before an app goes live. Later when Andrew came in and restructured my code, I was inspired by good coding style and knew that I still got a lot to learn. 

During the my time at home, I worked part-time and built a prototype for the Lexity iOS app. It's been a great chance for me to use what I learnt about iOS and build something from scratch. I've done little iOS programming before so it's been an adventure to me. Sometimes I was quite excited about getting things work but for the most of time, I was baffled by some quirks of iOS and "rummaged" through iOS doc for solutions. Anyway, I learnt a lot. At the end, I successfully brought up a prototype for the views and set up a Core Data model and network framework. With some more work on rendering the views, it shall be a working app. : )

It's been a great summer with Lexity. I especially like the people here. They are very special as individuals and together form an excellent team. I have a lot of fun with the team since everybody is hard-working, funny and friendly here. 

I enjoy my work. I turned down some bigger companies' offers or interviews to become part of Lexity, which is a relatively small. Now in retrospection, it was a WISE choice, because I learnt not only technical skills but also some precious experience about how a company is built up. It's not at all easy and from what I experienced, Amk (edit: our nickname for Amit, our CEO) does an awesome job. He is generous with workers' need, careful about building up the culture for the team and, most importantly, highly focused on Lexity's work. I can tell he is more concentrated and more passionate about what Lexity is doing than anyone. I learnt a great deal from him as a leader of a company and it's been a very pleasant experience to have such a easy-going person as the boss.  

- Peter Zhenghao Qian, aka Peter Prime