commit c4b33dc9a6b2a80d0678f12418ec05967842f9da
parent 883dff0e16d062a657e373048797d6fd2bd3bfb5
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2024 20:19:53 -0600
Add Envelope writeup
Diffstat:
3 files changed, 105 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/work/envelope.md b/content/work/envelope.md
@@ -1,14 +0,0 @@
-+++
-title = "Envelope"
-description = "The banking platform with built-in budgeting"
-date = 2024-09-03
-[extra]
-type = "work"
-start = 2024-06-17
-end = 2024-09-06
-+++
-
-Reflection coming soon!
-
-<!--So much swag.
-Josh is brilliant. Working a 9-5. Frontend? Startups?-->
diff --git a/content/work/envelope/github.png b/content/work/envelope/github.png
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/content/work/envelope/index.md b/content/work/envelope/index.md
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++++
+title = "Envelope"
+description = "The banking platform with built-in budgeting"
+date = 2024-09-03
+updated = 2024-09-14
+[extra]
+type = "work"
+start = 2024-06-17
+end = 2024-09-06
++++
+
+YCombinator's [job board] has high signal to noise for interesting work,
+but it's not every day that their internship tab has as compelling a
+phrase as "SwiftUI Engineer." I've been in love with SwiftUI, Apple's
+modern app-building framework, [for a long time]. Something about its
+[declarative nature] just clicks with how I think. I sent in an
+application, sat down for a live coding interview, and my summer plans
+were sorted.
+
+[Envelope] is a banking app. It serves as both your primary checking
+account and your budgeting platform: the two are seamlessly integrated.
+Every transaction that hits your bank is budgeted by default. Envelope
+lowers the barrier to entry for your most important personal finance
+habit: great budgeting.
+
+It also helps that Envelope brings all the polish of a fancy Silicon
+Valley company to banking, a field dominated by the jankiest apps known
+to man.
+
+## Tenure
+One bullet point in the job description claimed that I would have code
+live in production starting from my first day. This was not true. But
+it was close! In my first week at the company, I built out a new feature
+shown—to every user, on the front page of the app—when assigning a
+transaction to an envelope. It is now one of the most used pieces of UI
+in the app.
+
+Over the rest of the summer, I continued building and iterating on
+practically every facet of the application. By my count we shipped nine
+long-requested major features and redesigns, touching everything from
+transactions and envelopes to onboarding and the organization of screens
+within the app. I took a look on my last day at our improvised Figma
+kanban board, and was happy and more than a little bit surprised to see
+the done column overflowing with projects we'd shipped.
+
+
+
+One particularly fun piece of work that I'd like to immortalize here was
+totally removed from feature development: we once spent two days
+debugging the [Stytch] [JWT] that our app uses to authenticate users.
+When we ultimately located the bug—a particularly nasty problem with
+refreshing the token that rendered it invalid after using the app for
+longer than five minutes at a time—we were able to fix it with one line.
+We also got a DM from a co-founder of Stytch out of the whole
+experience, and sent them some API design pointers that I sincerely hope
+make it back to [their SDK] one day.
+
+I'm excited to see Envelope grow, and for the additional features
+that I didn't have time to put in your hands to see the light
+of day. From closer integration with external money sources, certain
+additional banking tools, and some cool UI we couldn't ship due to
+dependency issues—I'll be keeping an eye on the future of the features I
+built out and the future of the whole enterprise.
+
+## Reflections
+Josh, the CTO, is brilliant. I was the second engineer at the company—a
+fun statement for me in its own right, but also formidable by
+implication. Josh built out the entire backend, external integrations,
+and SwiftUI application, and had been running them both as a serious
+product for two years as the only technical person on the team. Josh is
+deeply opinionated about how software should be developed and
+maintained, employing a crazy effective philosophy breaking complex
+problems down into distinct patterns. He is deeply talented, and I spent
+a good part of my internship just trying to absorb some fraction of his
+skill.
+
+The realities of the job were also completely new to me. Working a 9-5
+took some getting used to; at Stanford, I am surrounded by people doing
+crazy and fun things from the moment I wake up until I pass out and in
+class for maybe three hours of the day. In school, the day is for play
+and work is confined to some fraction of the evenings, but at Envelope
+this was flipped. I think I obviously appreciate the flexibility of how
+work is done at Stanford over the more traditionally rigid hours. It's
+nice to have time to ponder, to be free to meet with people for lunch
+and tea throughout the day. My work at Envelope also helped me
+contextualize the sort of programming I want to do in the future. Pure
+frontend work, devoid of context, is just making a hundred buttons a
+day—and when you've made one button, you've really made them all.
+However, working with data, building out new functionality, reshaping
+and redesigning the user experience: that is deeply fulfilling. My time
+at Envelope allowed me to touch on all of these aspects of development
+and take a holistic approach to my work.
+
+My time at Envelope was a blast and a privilege. Every change I made
+went out to thousands of people using our app on a daily basis. What an
+incredible opportunity it was to be able to shape something like that so
+directly.
+
+[job board]: https://www.workatastartup.com
+[for a long time]: @/projects/txtodo/index.md
+[declarative nature]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming
+[Envelope]: https://envelopebudgeting.com
+[Stytch]: https://stytch.com
+[JWT]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7519
+[their SDK]: https://github.com/stytchauth/stytch-ios
