Expedia Internship - Week 1

My First Week as a SWE Intern at Expedia: Diving into the World of Travel Tech

I officially started my journey as a Software Engineering Intern at Expedia on May 20th, and I’m really excited to share my experiences and learnings over the coming weeks! I must admit, I’ve felt a bit of pressure — this is my first real exposure to software development. As a machine learning student at Polytechnique Montréal, Python has been the main language I’ve needed for the past two years.

The first tasks

The week began with essential onboarding tasks. I set up my work laptop and environment, installed the necessary tools and software, and dove into the company documentation. Expedia has a well-structured onboarding process for interns, including guides on various topics and learning sessions with employees. I had many courses and tasks to complete before the start of the second week.

The “Hello World!” guide stood out as one of the most important. I learned so much from it — everything from the development process to the CI/CD pipeline that I’ll be using over the next few months.

Overcome lack of experience

Towards the end of the week, I realized I needed to catch up on some key technologies that are central to Expedia’s tech stack but hadn’t been covered in my university curriculum. I started taking courses on Kotlin and Spring Boot, two technologies I had never worked with before. My only prior experience with Java was a brief introduction two years ago at Supaero, so diving into Kotlin and Spring Boot has been both challenging and exciting.

To be honest, I was a little overwhelmed. I had never done any real software development before. Spring Boot, Maven, Kotlin, CI/CD, Kafka — it all felt like a whirlwind of unfamiliar concepts. But things turned out fine thanks to the tremendous amount of guidance and learning resources available. I even found myself working a bit over the weekend — although I quickly realized the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance and plan to stick to weekday hours moving forward.

As I look ahead to the coming weeks, I’m eager to apply what I’ve learned and dive deeper into real projects. The learning curve is steep, but the supportive environment at Expedia and the wealth of available resources make me confident that I’ll soon be able to contribute meaningfully to the team.