What TripleTen Externships Are Really Like: Rebuilding Synthesis Workshop’s Website

How much of our success can we contribute to “learning on the job”? It’s likely that a large portion, if not all, of your skill set and expertise wasn’t developed in a classroom or through reading books, but rather through practical application.

This is why we’re often drawn to internships, volunteering, and other work-related opportunities that allow us to take what we think we know and actually try it out in action. The added benefit, of course, is an impressive resume and portfolio of achievements_{Why Externships Are Great for Your Portfolio} that make us an easy sell to employers.

But what if we want both the booksmarts and the real-world experience, without the steep price of college? Signing up for a bootcamp with externships — like TripleTen — may just be the move. 

Externships are a lot like internships in that they’re typically done in tandem with gaining a certification or degree, or completing some kind of education.

Below, we’ll walk you through one externship our students recently completed with open-access video podcast Synthesis Workshop to give you a sense of the value a bootcamp with an externship can provide career changers and those looking to break into the tech world.

The problem: making science content accessible

Synthesis Workshop was started in 2020 as a way to condense recent findings and advancements in organic synthesis into a more digestible format for researchers in the field. Matthew Horwitz, a chemist as well as the startup’s founder and editor-in-chief, knew that he could save scientists time and energy they could be spending on their research. 

The initiative quickly grew in the last few years. Initially, only Horwitz published content, but the project developed to encompass a community of experts contributing videos and overseeing the editorial process. With more content and expanded resources like problem sets and courses, it became harder for a visitor to easily find specific topics or filter for specific videos. Horwitz realized the website needed an overhaul.

Horwitz’s brother Josh was a mentor at TripleTen, and together they saw an opportunity for Josh’s students to help out Synthesis Workshop while honing their coding and quality assurance skills. 

I know the chemistry, but I don’t know how to set up a website that has these kinds of features and what tools you would need. But by having these people do the externship, then they can simultaneously get the useful experience and also build something that’s useful for the community that I work in. Matthew Horwitz, a chemist, the startup’s founder and editor-in-chief

The process: redesigning and rebuilding the website

To start, the two teams held a kickoff meeting, where Horwitz explained to TripleTen’s cohort what the old website had been built for and how his needs had changed. “If it’s difficult to find content in an increasingly large amount of data and an increasingly large amount of content, it’s very useful to have a search function,” he says.

Other additions they discussed included updated graphics and design elements. The group used Figma to outline this design phase and coach the software engineers through creating the new website. “It’s sort of setting the bar for what we wanted it to look like, and checking in with them periodically as they would go,” Horwitz says. 

In the software development_{What Skills Do You Need to Become a Software Engineer} process, TripleTen’s programmers used technologies and tools such as React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and GraphQL, and achieved deployment with Heroku, AWS, Amazon S3, and GitHub. 

“The focus of the project was revamping Synthesis Workshop’s website to make it more user-friendly and visually appealing. One of our primary goals was to modernize the website while ensuring it remained accessible to all users. Leveraging innovative technologies such as TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, we implemented sleek design elements and intuitive navigation features, enhancing the overall user experience,” says Ian Dizney_{3 Things That Made TripleTen's Software Engineering Program Exceptional}, a graduate of TripleTen’s software engineering bootcamp who worked on the Synthesis Workshop project.

One challenging aspect of the externship was developing the search function pivotal to organizing Synthesis Workshop’s content. “You want the search function to be able to find both things that are in the title as well as the YouTube description, as well as things which are neither in the title or the description, but still describe what’s going on in the episode,” Horwitz explains. “And the solution that they came up with was to build an Excel database of keywords that apply to each episode.” His team took this task on, then passed the database to TripleTen’s students to incorporate into the search function. “Now it’s possible to search through our entire database of episodes and find something related to what you’re interested in,” he says.

The result: positive community response

Horwitz and the larger Synthesis Workshop community are thrilled with the final product TripleTen’s participants delivered. “It’s already clear from the community that this is a much better version of the site,” he says. In the following weeks, he plans to do a more formal launch of the website to promote the updates and collect user feedback.

I think [the community response will] be very positive, and I think the product delivered will be enormously useful in the long run. Matthew Horwitz, a chemist, the startup’s founder and editor-in-chief

What Horwitz loves most about the externship experience is how it can assist burgeoning organizations, especially those with little budget or resources, get the help they need to grow and succeed. “In an initiative like this where we don’t have funding and everyone that’s involved is doing it on a volunteer basis, it is a good match to have an externship for a pro bono initiative because, especially if you can deliver something useful, then it brings more attention to the initiative, and it’s also a very good experience for the developers,” he says.

Developers also saw the externship as a win-win, finding immense value in the exposure to a real company’s inner workings. “Participating in an externship with TripleTen was a defining moment in my learning journey,” says Dizney. “I encountered a diverse range of challenges that encouraged me to continuously expand my skill set. Additionally, collaborating with fellow engineers in a professional environment provided insights into the importance of effective communication, teamwork, and project management — skills that are indispensable in the software engineering industry,” he adds.

You can learn more about the Synthesis Workshop project by watching our recent livestream with Josh and Matt.

Discover our externships

Eighty-seven percent of TripleTen graduates_{Why TripleTen Grads Have an 87% Chance of Getting Hired} get hired within 180 days of finishing their bootcamp. This is in large part thanks to our externships, where students get to exercise crucial tech skills_{The Most In-Demand Tech Skills That Will Get You Hired} in a corporate setting, be mentored by veteran engineers, and grow their portfolio of work.

If you’re interested in delving deeper into the externship experience, check out our externship guide — or book a call with our team today to answer your most burning questions.