The first two weeks had more of a training-like structure. There would be sessions about the basics, like frontend, backend, APIs, collaboration on GitHub, etc. As a cohort, we would apply whatever we learned in those sessions in our respective projects when possible. In parallel, as a team, we worked on making engineering decisions and compiling as much content in technical specifications (tech specs for short) as possible. We ended up writing more than 100 pages describing everything about a feature from how it would look like on the frontend and the network calls it would trigger to the architecture of the API responses and data management in the backend. While other teams started working on the technical side of the project right away, we took more time in the beginning to plan everything out.

This is the first post out of a series that I decided to share about my experience working at Duolingo. I will be mostly discussing my technical progression, but every now and then I will share valuable lessons that I learned through this experience and from others.