TLDR
For those who are not really interested in reading some random university student’s story, here is a short TLDR. I worked at Appwrite as an Engineering Intern for 6 months and just got offered a full-time position as a Platform Engineer, while still being in University for another year :D
The story ahead covers how while drowning in a sea of desperation a light of hope changed everything for me, how my experience was working for a fully remote OSS company, and the challenges I faced while working in PHP, a language I had never touched before this :p
Pre-Interview
Back in September-November 2024, I was kind of at the lowest point of my engineering journey yet. I had concluded my last internship around August when the project I was working on abruptly closed, and since then I was on a constant hunt for my next one.
Silence. From all the mediums I tried - LinkedIn, Upwork, AngelList, cold DMs, and what not.
The thing is that once you start “working”, although it was an unpaid one, it’s pretty hard to go back to doing… nothing. “Nothing” is the wrong word I guess, I was still working on OSS, building projects, and trying to learn new things. But if someone asked what I was up to nowadays… i drew a blank.
Then one day I was just hanging out on Discord and saw a notification from a bright red server I usually didn’t check much. Hey, it’s another job opening, so I applied like usual. Another month passed, silence again. But then I saw an email from Emma, our People’s person at Appwrite.
“We wanna have a chat with you.”
This was a very unusual email for me. Usually, companies like to give an assignment for the first round, but here it was a direct meeting scheduled… so I already knew something was different this time.
The Interview(s)
Of course, I am not allowed to share the entire interview experience without getting into a call with Emma after this is published. So, I just want to share one question that has stuck with me since then,
“Looking at your resume, you don’t seem to have much if any experience with PHP. And Appwrite’s entire backend is in PHP. Will you be able to handle this?” - Torsten, Product Engineer at Appwrite.
Stunned. Before going to the interview I did see the codebase was written in PHP. I had never touched it before. No contributions, No issues filed. So I assumed the position I was applying for might have nothing related to this codebase… maybe a new project altogether… right? Nope.
My answer? It was somewhere along the lines of “I will figure it out, trust me, bro”.
Very bad answer I know. But it was the best I could come up with. After the interview, I went on a grind. Reading the codebase, running it, and understanding its architecture (in that process I even wrote an article - Architecture Patterns for Beginners: MVC, MVP, and MVVM). Long story short I tried to learn as much about Appwrite’s codebase as was physically possible in that timeframe from the next interview scheduled.
And Tada~ It worked. I got the offer!
Experience
Working at Appwrite is unlike working in any other place. From the first day on, even though you are an Intern, you are never treated like one. I was introduced to the entire codebase in my first week and assigned to issues not from the pending log, but actual production issues that users were facing.
You can message anyone. At any point.
Work on any issue that you like.
There is a padding issue you saw on the website? Knock yourself out and raise the PR.
The beautiful thing about Appwrite being open source is that you could do this from the very start. It’s just now I could bug anyone on the team more freely if I was stuck on any issue.
It’s hard to summarise how much work I did in the past 6 months, but here are some notable ones:
- 200+ PRs merged in the Appwrite organization’s repositories, including main, website, SDK, MCP, etc. repositories.
- Uptime monitoring for the Appwrite Assistant.
- Adding a monthly limit to the number of free Phone OTPs allowed.
- Fixing Amazon and Slack OAuth adapters. Add Figma OAuth adapter.
- Making several changes to SDKs and making releases.
- Adding Types generation to Appwrite CLI.
- Worked on the DevKeys feature in the latest Appwrite release 1.7
- Added 2 blogs on the website - self-hosting using coolify and announcement for DevKeys.
- Taking leadership on the Synapse project, operating system gateway for remote serverless environments.
- Adding new phone OTP adapter - Inforu, which reduces pricing for phone OTPs for Israeli users by 11x.
- and… a lot more.
Honestly looking back at it, I never realized I worked on so much. It feels like I had just joined Appwrite yesterday.
Thank You
At last, I wanna thank the entire Appwrite team for treating me like part of the team since day one, and for giving me this opportunity. Let’s build like a team of hundreds_
You can check out my profile to learn more about me - https://www.chiragaggarwal.tech/
Hit me up on any socials if you have any doubts, I am always up for a chat :D
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