I already can’t wait to drop some major challenges in the laps of our two incoming Fall interns to see what they can build.

- Khan Academy Internship, Summer ‘11

Check!

David Hu and Julian Pulgarin stepped up to the plate this Fall during their coopsinternships from University of Waterloo. We call ‘em internships because we’re from Amurrrrica, you crazy Canadians.

When hanging with friends and family recently, I found myself shocked by how willing my brain is to completely forget stories that were surely once described as unforgettable. I don’t have any desire to forget what we’re doing at Khan Academy, and that’s kinda sorta why being as open as possible is one of our core dev principles.

The Summer ‘11 story is already a nice piece of shared history that helps me answer every intern candidate who asks, “What kind of project do interns work on at Khan Academy?”. Here’s my version of the Fall story.

If tales about battling a bison for the right to cross a road can get up and walk out of my head,
then…well…better keep blogging.

David

It doesn’t get much more open than David’s post about how we use machine learning to assess student mastery. If I tried to summarize it for you, you’d see my managerial hair start spiking up and up and up toward the ceiling, Pinocchio-style. I won’t insult the work by talking about the statistics. Instead, I’ll just say that we now have a much better understanding of how competent each Khan student is in each math subject. Thanks, David.

That’s not all he did. From a dashboard to emphasize the importance of our exercises to a much smoother way of asking students to review work they’ve done in the past, he covers it all in this Vi Hart-inspired internship post-mortem.

Keeping an eye on our students’ activity via David’s dashboard

Forgetful Ben from the future is grateful for this video. And he’s also super-jacked and smart.

Julian

If anybody reading this has ever beaten Julian Pulgarin in chess, please rub his nose in it. Julian wiped the floor with me so many times that he would beg me to play him while he was blindfolded. My ego can’t handle that sort of hit, so I usually just deleted some data from production and pretended to be disappointed at each newfound emergency’s particularly poor timing.

When he wasn’t humoring me, Julian made major contributions across the board.

He started by building a number of new exercises for students to learn from, including an experimental crack at a new way of teaching fraction intuition. While working on this, he realized that it was painful to test our open source contributor’s GitHub pull requests, so he disappeared for a few days and came back with Sandcastle. Sandcastle automatically tags every pull request with a link that lets our developers test out the requests’ new exercise content in one click.

It’s a shining example of the reason we hire smart people and set them free to get things done. The first time Julian told me about his Sandcastle idea, I didn’t even really understand the direction. Now it’s indispensable.

Julian also gave our first KA Friday Tech Talk about how to do gradual feature rollouts for various segments of a large userbase. He ended up bringing this full-circle at the end of his internship by building Gandalf, our tool for doing the following:

Gandalf lets us selectively roll out features to all sorts of different subsections of our userbase.

“YOU SHA — ok, you guys, Hey!, you guys over there, you can pass — BUT OTHER THAN THEM YOU SHALL NOT PASS.”

Julian even “accidentally” left his chess set in Mountain View for us to mail back to him, which I’m pretty sure was his way of dropping the mic and walking off stage. “You clean up.”

In conclusion, University of Waterloo is legit. I skipped over plenty of work done by both David and Julian, and it still makes for an impressive Fall Winter there are seasons in Mountain View? As argued in the previous internship’s summary, any team that’s not dedicating tons of resources to both recruiting and mentoring interns is plain old missing out. We’re loving every minute of working with our interns.

BONUS!

Much like the phoenix or a tyrannosaurus flying a fighter jet, Summer ‘11 intern Joel Burget has risen from out of nowhere and dropped entertaining stories about his summer’s work. If you read them, are impressed, and want to hire Joel…you can forget it. He’s now full-time Joel.

If you wanna tag in next, the Summer ‘12 internship class still has openings.