My Internship with CareGuide

As a university student fresh out of my first year, I was excited when I was given the opportunity to work at CareGuide. As my first professional job, the entire experience couldn’t have been any better. Throughout my four months here at CareGuide, I experienced a lot of new technologies and what it's like to work in an agile development environment. I was given the opportunity to work on several interesting projects. Here are some outstanding ones:

Grafana

The goal for this project was to import our data into InfluxDB and graph it on Grafana. The focus was to dynamically perform aggregate functions on all our data. I was able to write a script and get all our data into InfluxDB only to find out that InfluxDB limited us to perform the aggregate functions we wanted on our data. I looked for alternatives as a backend for Grafana and found out about Graphite. Based on its documentation, it was everything we were looking for. This project taught me a lot about time series databases, and I was given the freedom to change the entire backend.

Various SEO Projects

Throughout my time here I worked on various SEO projects. One that stands out was was creating the dynamic footer on all our sites. The goal for this project was to take advantage of our large profile of domain names and externally link all our sites together for SEO purposes. This project taught me a lot about internal domain linking and external domain linking. Overall, throughout my time here at CareGuide, I had the chance to learn a lot about SEO best practices.

Mailers

I worked on various emails we send out to our users. I got a lot out of this experience by learning about internet email campaigning, A/B testing and email click through optimization. The goal for the mailers is to increase customer interaction and promote new campaigns or features CareGuide has added. All the mailers I helped implement were a success.

Overall, CareGuide has been nothing but a positive experience. The projects listed were all given to me based on what I wanted to try out and learn. I was given lots of freedom, which helped me explore all different aspects of the technology we use. The team here is smart, tight knit and extremely helpful. It didn’t feel like a work place, but more like a family.