One of this year’s interns, Harry Albert, spent the summer working on Bubble’s mobile app builder. The two-month internship program is designed to give a select group of applicants insight into what it’s like to work at Bubble — plus participate in team events and career development sessions.
We sat down with Harry to ask him about his experience so far and how he became a Bubble intern in the first place.
How did you end up at Bubble?
My first real experience programming was at a VFX company (Cadence Effects). There, I streamlined a lot of workflows with Python tooling. Then at my first internship at Meta, I realized that I really enjoyed frontend and full-stack development.
I first heard about Bubble through Neo Scholars, a program for top college students in computer science to find fast-growing startups to work at. When I heard about Bubble, a lightbulb went off: Here was a no-code platform anyone could use to build truly complex tools and powerful products — a platform I certainly could have used in my previous roles. I knew without question that this was where I wanted to be.
Tell us about your intern project.
My main project has been developing built-in support for swipe actions in lists, i.e., the “swipe-to-do-something” pattern.
Working on this project has been really exciting, especially given how valuable this feature will be to users. Almost any mobile list can make use of swipe actions, so understanding how much time and effort I’m saving Bubble Developers by supporting this functionality out of the box is super motivating.
Likewise, the work has also been consistently interesting and technically challenging — pairing variability of use cases with the complex animations required to make swipe actions has made the project difficult in the best possible way. Plus, through this project, I’ve gotten to interact with almost every aspect of the Bubble editor and code in both React Native and SolidJS, honing my frontend skills on both mobile and web.
What’s been your proudest moment so far?
I think my proudest moment during my internship was when I finished planning out exactly what work needed to be done for my intern project, and then writing tickets (discrete tasks) for all of that work. Part of what’s so awesome about interning at Bubble is that you’re treated like a full engineer on the team, so when I asked if I could participate in planning my intern project I was allowed to take the lead.
Planning out my project was, at first, intimidating. Creating tickets for a project requires you to take a high-level vision and provide very specific, detailed steps for how to execute that vision. But with the help of my amazing mentor, Manasi, I made solid headway early on in the shaping process, which built up my confidence and allowed me to create a detailed plan much more quickly than I expected.
Describe a typical day as a Bubble intern.
I usually wake up, eat some breakfast (and play the New York Times games), and then head into the office via Citi bike — a great way to both get a bit of fresh air and see the city. Though I sometimes work from home, I really enjoy going in — the Bubble office always has a lot of good energy.
Once I get to the office, I’ll say “hi” to everybody, catch up on emails, and then get started coding. Though there are occasional meetings earlier in the day, most of my time is spent focusing on programming, which is a great balance. The product has such a huge scope, but at the same time each feature has so much depth and thought put into it. Because of that, I feel that no matter what I’m working on, I’m always learning something new about the codebase. This was a little daunting at first, but once I got used to it I found this level of challenge very fulfilling and exciting.
My biggest coding break is usually for lunch, which Bubble caters a few days a week — though it’s seemingly a small thing, the amount of people who come in for lunch honestly makes a huge difference in the company and office culture.
After that, I usually hit the road between 5 PM and 6 PM, depending on how the work is going and if I’ve hit a natural stopping point. I enjoy running home, but the heat in the city this summer has made it pretty hard to get motivated, so sometimes I’ll head to a yoga class instead. Once I’m done with that, I’ll either cook dinner or grab a meal with some friends to cap off my day.
What are three words that describe Bubble’s culture?
Empowering, driven, and user-centered.
Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
