Robert Mirandola was at work one day with the chief technology officer where he interns at Kingston-based Distributive when he was reminded of a favourite quote from the legendary soccer coach Johan Cruyff: “Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”
It dawned on the student that the philosophy could also apply to the programming he was doing as an intern.
One of many valuable lessons that Mirandola has learned during his 16-month Queen's Undergraduate Internship Program (QUIP) internship at Distributive is to focus on efficiency and simplicity. He realized you could spend hours writing complicated code or take 35 minutes to think about the problem and then five minutes to do it. "Writing code should be simple, but writing code simply is the hardest thing there is to do," he concluded.
As a Web Developer intern, Mirandola analyzes user and client needs and designs software to meet those needs.
“The benefits of working for a local organization the size of Distributive is you get to be part of several aspects of software development” says Mirandola. In August 2023, he will return to Queen's to complete his final year in the Computing and Communications stream of the Mathematics and Engineering program. He says his internship has given him a clear idea about his career path due to the diverse exposure to different tasks and sections. Working and contributing to Distributive’s key objectives and helping the company grow was a key part of that development. “I’m not just sitting there pushing pencils all day,” he says. “I’m doing work and that was something that was really important to me because, if I’m going to be somewhere for 16 months, I want to get the most out of it.”
According to Distributive CEO Dan Desjardins, this is the sixth year that the company has hired interns, including four in a row through QUIP. Interns make up part of the “excellent talent pipeline” at the company. Interns at Distributive work on one of three teams: Core, AI Task force, and Toolchains. Mirandola was assigned to the Core team, which builds the core components of the company’s distributed computing platform.
Desjardins describes the Distributive Compute Protocol (DCP) as taking big computer problems and breaking them into thousands and sometimes millions of “little pieces” spread out over a large number of computers instead of just one. “We solve many little pieces in parallel and then put the answers back together.”
Interns at Distributive are treated as full employees, says the CEO, who also stresses they are not left entirely on their own. There are people and resources to help them. Desjardins follows the principles of honesty and “clear is kind” management for interns and doesn’t believe a student should know it all. “We welcome them with open arms knowing they have everything to learn.”
Mirandola remembers well his introduction to Distributive because he didn’t have much experience with programming in JavaScript, but he found people were helpful. Desjardins, who was a professor at the Royal Military College until 2022, feels it’s an employer’s responsibility to teach students, “because then they continue growing not just inside our walls but also in Canadian society.”
Interns like Mirandola appreciate three benefits of working at Distributive: patience, mentorship, and challenges. Desjardins, in turn, appreciates what he calls the “diversity of thinking” that interns bring to the company. Whether it’s developing games or the arts, each intern brings a passion to the job and the results are productive.
Nearly 12 months later, Mirandola is now contributing quality code into the distributed computing platform’s core logic under the direction of senior developers. In larger companies, interns are not normally allowed to work that deeply within a company’s core codebase. This is one of the unique opportunities that interns have at Distributive; deep hands-on experience writing meaningful and impactful code.
For Mirandola, whose first month of his internship was spent writing component tests and debugging existing problems, one of the exciting challenges was in “reskinning” a website, essentially stripping down the site to a simplified version that was used for a survey on who would use DCP and why.
Working with a client for the first time in his career was richly rewarding, he says.
"I highly recommend a 12–16-month internship to any student, especially in engineering, because, unlike a four-month internship, you'll have sufficient time to hit your strides, learn and meaningfully contribute,' he says. At the end of my first few months, I felt like, ok, I'm ready to get started now!"
“I'm glad I took on the opportunity with Distributive. The partnerships Queen’s has with local small and medium sized companies offer incredible learning opportunities for students.”
This article is relevant to the following Strategic Actions as defined in the Strategic Plan:
