Ciena

I joined Ciena as a summer intern in 2015 during my first year of junior college. I had programmed both for fun and for profit since early in high school, but I had never worked in a professional setting.

At Ciena, I worked in a scrappy internal startup under very senior people. I was fortunate — and am forever grateful — to have had such strong mentorship so early in my career. The startup nature of the project meant that I learned a lot very quickly and hit the ground running.

My summer project was supposed to be implementing a CI/CD pipeline, but I ended up doing that in the first two weeks. After that, my bosses gave me free rein to work on anything our team needed. My interests led me to work on the platform move to Kubernetes, which was a great experience and I spent a lot of time learning the cloud.

I got to go to AWS re:Invent in 2017, which was a great experience. My team was very supportive of my learning and growth, and I got to see a lot of cool stuff.

At Ciena, I was brought back for a follow-up internship and went part-time during the school year while waiting to get application results from four-year universities. However, before I could get results back, I joined a new startup with several of my colleagues from Ciena.

Ciena is my only past employer, so my retrospective is a bit limited. However, one former colleague told me, “in the end, all that matters is the people.” Looking back, I think that is true. All the project, the code, the sprints, the meetings. It’s all cool.

But what stands out, above all else, is the people. I am very grateful for the people I worked with at Ciena.

Projects

I worked on a whole bunch of things in my brief time at Ciena. Here are a few I am particularly proud of:

• Kubernetes Migration — I worked as second-chair on the migration from an internal platform to Kubernetes on AWS. I learned a lot about the DevOps mindset from the lead.
• Sales & Quoting — I worked on the quoting and ordering system for Ciena’s products. I learned a lot about how complex a multi-national company’s product catalog, sales, and delivery process can be. The product I worked on from nothing now processes every dime of Ciena’s $3.5b yearly revenue.
• CI/CD Pipeline — I smashed expectations on this. I overpromised and overdelivered. This pipeline help up to a variety of unexpected use cases and was a great success. It reduced the time to fix bugs and deploy features from days to hours.
• SSO Login — I added SSO (SAML 2) login to our platform. It required working with a lot of different teams and understanding a lot of different systems.