Info
This was written in December 2024, over 8 months since I had finished the co-op term. I will definitely not be mentioning everything in detail, as this is more of an informal review/rambling about my experience at Caribou Contests.
Setting The Scene
For everyone who has never heard of Caribou Contests, they are a small math competition company that makes math contests, coding contests, & more for school age kids (grades K-12). The team is extremely small, consisting of the CEO & Brock University Math Professor Thomas Wolf, part time finance/HR/anything else wizard Joanne Tejeda, and a small group of co-op students. That’s everyone.
Interview
The interview was very quick and entirely behavioural. I was asked some standard interview questions like “tell me about yourself” and “tell me a time when you had to solve a problem”. Basically, they were just looking for someone who was open to learning and is good at solving problems.
”Orientation” & Onboarding
During the Winter 2024 term, there were 4 other software developer co-ops, Matthew Wayoe, Chauncey Li, Edward Li, and Steven Cao. Most of us had no prior experience in any sort of software development role (and I only had course work experience, not even any personal projects). The only real information I knew about the company was that I participated in a single contest back when I was in the 8th grade.
On our first day we were given access to everything we needed (admin accounts, GitHub repo, anything else we may have needed), and a single Google doc containing information on how to set up the local environment. This was the entire onboarding process. At this point (day 2), we were considered ready to start coding & fixing bugs.
Three days into my co-op term, I was already pushing code to the production site. I thought this was crazy in the moment, but I didn’t realize how insane it was until my Sun Life internship where I didn’t even make my first PR until a month in.
Culture & Environment
Since the company was so small, we didn’t really have any formal meetings of any kind. We would have a quick stand up in the morning where we would just explain what we finished the day before, and what we plan on doing on that day. Each of us co-op students would be working on our own projects/issues, so there was nearly no collaboration. Because of this, any issues you may have encountered were pretty much all on you to figure out. There were no senior developers/employees (except Thomas Wolf, but he doesn’t know a ton about the technical side of web development), so you really had to be good at working individually and staying on task.
For task management/delegation, we just used the GitHub issues page connected to the repo. We would pick an issue, fix it, close it, and pick another one. Considering the list of open tickets was ~290 issues long, there was definitely no lack of things needing to be done. We were almost never assigned specific tickets, unless they were urgent and needed to be completed ASAP.
We were also free to have a flexible schedule, as long as we finished the required number of hours. It was preferred that we worked 9:00 am to 4:50 pm each day, but we were able to start late if we worked later into the night, or take a day off as long as we made up the time. There were a couple times when we were messaged after hours about an urgent fix, but this was rare and really only happened on contest days (when the site has the most traffic). I had no complaints with this system.
Technology & Coding Practices
Another side effect of not having any experienced developers was not conducting any sort of code reviews at all. Yes, this led to issues and is as bad as it sounds. All of us would pretty much just create a PR, approve and merge it ourselves, then SSH into the server to git pull. There were also almost no coding guidelines or best practices, other than “leave comments or write documentation so the next co-op students have something to work with”.
I believe they now do perform code reviews before merging to prod (thankfully), but I’m not sure if thats because they have to or if the current co-op students have previous co-op/club/… experiences where they did this.
The tech stack was also pretty outdated. We used PHP and XAMPP, likely because that’s what’s taught in COSC 2P89 (Internet Technologies), and the company started with Brock students. We also used JavaScript with JQuery, which was slightly more relevant, but that’s it.
Basically, to sum it all up, we were all on our own and were pretty much free to solve each issue however we saw fit.
What I Did
As I mentioned before, we were pretty much able to pick and choose what issues we wanted to work on. I started out by finishing some of the simpler issues, just just updating some wording, adding/updating links to an admin page, and fixing some minor errors that were showing up in the XAMPP error log.
Then, I found issue #620, “Interactive Game: Tangram 3D”, which was a ticket made back in 2020 as a note/reminder, basically saying “if someone wants to work to make this happen, feel free”. I decided that this was what I wanted to do, and spent the next ~3 months working almost exclusively on this project. This project ended up becoming Packing, which at the time of me writing this, has over 35000 plays to date. A couple months ago, I wrote a blog post explaining what “Packing” is and how I made it. Check it out if you’re interested in seeing the process of how I made it, start to (almost) finish.
After completing Packing, I went back to completing some other GitHub issues. Since I had spent months working with mostly JavaScript, I ended up leaning more towards the issues relating to the games on the site, as I felt most comfortable and could fix stuff pretty quickly.
Notably, I spent a full week basically being Caribou Contest’s customer service person. We had a massive issue during one of the contest days, which led to people having to recomplete the contest if they already did it, or just skip it entirely if they were not able to do it after the scheduled time. This led to many, MANY customer support emails that were just too much for Thomas Wolf to handle while also teaching university level math courses & running the rest of the company. I will say, I didn’t totally hate it, but this is where the “other duties as required” came into effect for me.
Conclusion & Review
Overall, despite all the negative things I’ve said here, this experience was extremely valuable to me and I doubt I would have had the chance to learn and do as much as I could anywhere else. If you have no previous co-op experience, I would recommend applying as I honestly learned more here in 1 term than I did in my first year and a half of university courses. It’s unstructured, messy, and probably a little too cowboy-y, but I still had a great time and don’t regret it at all.
This work term also led to me getting a return offer for Fall 2024, spending 8 months working with Thomas Wolf as a Research Assistant at Brock University, and played a major role in me getting my Sun Life co-op position. I am very thankful I was able to work at Caribou and I am 100% certain it was worth it.