🔴 Hello Red Points!

This is the story of how I became a RedPointer and what it’s like to land in Red Points as a Front-End developer.

If you have been around lately, you may already know I went through a master degree at Assembler School in full-stack development. And yes, the time to search for the internship finally arrived. After some research, a bit of LinkedIn fine tunning, a lot of workshops on how to handle technical interviews and other useful resources that Assembler provided, I ended up with a pretty impressive amount of 8 offers.

Although it was very hard for me to decline offers and after so much thinking, I decided to take my internship at Red Points.

First things first: What is Red Points — What do they do?

Red Points is a consolidated start-up — medium company (scale-up) of around <250 employees and 700 clients. They operate since 2014 and are currently based in Salt Lake City, New York, Barcelona & Beijing whose mission is to fight online counterfeiting, piracy and protect brands in the online environment.

All those circumstances make Red Points such a nice place to work for its multicultural atmosphere including over 30 nationalities and 25 different spoken languages.

How do they do it?

This is possible due to a massive and smart software that is constantly scraping the net in search of infringements 🕵️‍♂️

This SaaS has quite a great deal of impressive superpowers:

- Scans the internet in search of piracy and counterfeiting.

- Handles intellectual property.

- Tracks sellers, keeping brands away from fraud.

- Executes resolution processes to suspend, cancel or recover domains that infringe trademarks.

- Makes informed decisions using tailor-made research, data-gathering, and analysis.

- Clustering technology scans websites, marketplaces, and social media profiles to match data and identify who hides behind products’ counterfeits.

- Tracks and alerts non-compliant distributors to protect brands and partner networks.

However, Red Points is not only that but also a large team of technicians and specialists who fight against this kind of malicious practices!

Why Red Points?

I decided to knock at their doors since a good friend of mine (Clara Ameller, with whom I had the pleasure to go through the Ironhack Bootcamp on 2017) had been happily working there for almost a year.

Another good reason to take a chance at Red Points was that everything fitted my desires 100%:

• I was looking for a final product company and not a consultancy or an agency. The fact I wanted it this way was because I already had the experience of working in an agency and I know that agencies tend to work against the clock with tight budgeting and timing. This fact puts testing, code best practices, code review and developer experience on the back burner (in most of the cases). And as you may have guessed, as a junior developer, it was a must for me to be in contact with such things.
• Red Points is somewhere in between a start-up & an established/stable company. This made the perfect balance between challenge, change and uncertainty vs stability.
• My interviewer (who happens to be my current boss) made a great impression on me, making me feel very comfortable during the whole selection process. He handled it the best way possible, giving fast answers to all the emails, arranging interviews in an agile way and taking the time to give proper feedback to my code. I remember thinking he had remarkable communication skills; being very plain, clear and honest.
• The stack was exactly what I was looking for: React + Redux + JEST. Although I had never worked with this stack before, I was very curious and determined to learn it, since most of the job offers in front-end development involved React (or at least that was my perception). It was also very remarkable the fact that I could stand a chance despite lacking experience and knowledge. Moreover, the % of legacy code seemed to be more than acceptable.
• The product. There’s nothing else to add really… Isn’t the product just brilliant? Intriguing, challenging and fascinating in equal proportion! The challenge was served! ✨
• I was also pleased by the way they manage their working pipeline, using Atlassian products all the way through. I never worked with the Atlassian suite and I was interested in learning about it and see how it worked alongside with GIT. Besides that, they work in a continuous integration mindset that makes them blend code very often and catch bugs in no time!
• The setup: They let me choose between mac and pc and I also had the chance to work with JetBrains software. Not to mention all of their projects have high test coverage, proper linter settings and local built-in environment served in Docker.
• They also provide free paid access to Frontend Masters which ensures endless learning!
• The fact they weren’t interested in full-stack profiles showed me they have enough work and resources to work in detached teams with fully-fledged specialised developers.
• It was very exciting having the chance to work with Clara (again), who made the best of the reviews about Red Points and only had nice words about what was it like to work there.
• I also felt very relieved when my interviewer told me I would start working on testing in order not to break anything.

About the selection process and the candidacy experience

I don’t think the selection process was the typical one in my case since I was looking for a part-time internship and Clara had already made me look like an outstanding developer 🥰. Besides, the process was smooth, easy and quick.

Onboarding

The first week is about getting to know all departments and following the onboarding plan which consists of Powerpoint, videos and quizzes that help to understand such a dense topic. However, this onboarding plan doesn’t give you an insight into your specific department (IT / Front End in my case) which makes it a little bit generalist and vague.

Also on the first 2 days, I assisted a Video Call with human resources where they introduce you to all the perks (gym discount, flexible retribution, team building activities, private health insurance, Red Pints on last Thursday every month) I have as an employee and all those must-know stuff like lunchtime, holidays, working hours and so on.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork

I just love the team so much I need to thank them all for being so collaborative and welcoming to me :) I really couldn’t be more comfortable!

The team is diverse and everyone is always available to help… Keep in mind that the Red Points architecture is complex and getting to know the business logic is certainly tough! This fact makes the people one of the most valued goods for Red Points.

Also, the Scrum methodology reinforces these principles and encourages people to work in this direction.

The Front-End Team

My team is adorable, I couldn’t ask for more. It’s a team formed by 12 people including a team lead (Remember my interviewer?), 3 suite leads and an architect.

I love the way we organise within the team, setting up polls to come up with agreements of our own that are written down and have to be followed thoroughly. We also have weekly meetings in which we speak about everything (even non-code-related topics are tackled on those weekly meetings) that we feel like sharing with the team, this way we all have our chance to be heard!

The Team Lead, who happens to be Aaron Planell is, in my opinion, the perfect fit for this position who stands out for being caring, honest and very communicative. Needless to say, he is a top-notch developer with broad expertise and proved years of experience. He is also very witty and loves making fun of everything, this makes him not only a good professional but also a person you love working with. We have 1:1 meetings with him every two months (Although we can also have 1:1 on-demand) in which we speak about all those things we need to tell him personally. He takes those 1:1 very seriously and works hard to make our stay as pleasant as he can.

As for the rest of the team, they are (no exceptions) brilliant developers and outstanding people who took a great deal of time to tell me all I needed to help me get to know the RedPoints technology. And I’ll always be thankful for that ❤️ They also like joking and trolling around one another which also makes it fun and hilarious to work with.

There’s a great proportion of junior/mid/senior developers which ensures a nicely written and tested code and makes it a great place to learn and grow as a developer!

Conclusion on my internship at RedPoints

I’m delighted how it all turned out! Despite the Coronavirus lockdown, I’m about to finish my 6 months internship at RedPoints and everything has been very challenging but rewarding so far.

It also came as a surprise to me the fact that they invited me to stay after the internship and I couldn’t be happier!

💻 HAPPY CODING!

www.cristinamoreno.dev