During my PEY work term from May 2022 to May 2023, I worked as a Software
Engineering Intern at Super.com. My role involved developing and maintaining a high-traffic
E-commerce website by developing various features, including UI enhancements, promotions,
advertisements, order lookup, and warranty management. I worked remotely in a diverse team
consisting of senior software engineers and several other members including the product manager,
data analyst, QA, designer, and marketing manager.

With a background in which I have developed several web applications in courses and as side
projects, I was interested in gaining practical experience as a software engineer from an
industrial project. Beyond that, I hoped to deepen my understanding of the workflow in software
development and entrepreneurship. The position at Super aligned well with my technical
background and my goal.

Major impacts

• Shifted to GraphQL for improving onsite search speed.
• Drove SuperCash cross-selling for sign-up (~10k) by creating Promotion UI components.
• Enabled marketplace sales by creating webhook APIs. Created comprehensive unit tests for the feature.
• Improved retention rate and NR by 30% in each quarter, doubling the net revenue within the year by product sales and ads, resulting in a revenue peak on Black Friday (10x than average).
• Integrated Fraud detection service, which improved NR by 20%.
• Refactored the problematic typing and interfaces in the project to improve program robustness and maintainability. Designed a paradigm for dealing with the complex and multifarious usages of types, by classifying types based on their source and usage, and created type parsers to purge unnecessary fields.
• Created various self-contained components for complicated third-party integrations, and improved development efficiency as developers can interact with third-party services like making an easy library call.

Timeline

May

• Created /snapmoney promotion page.
• ✨ Investigated product recommendation mechanism, and documented the investigation process as a record of learning and understanding the codebase.
• Fixed OpenGraph SEO.
• ✨ Implemented Google AdSense integration. Created a component along with context, so that developers can easily place AdSense banners to the page with a single-line reference.
• Cleaned up expired AB-test features.
• ✨ Investigated and fixed purchase event webhook bugs, and gained experience with debugging with logs and experiments.

June

• ✨ Created useIntersectionObserver, facilitated using IntersectionObserver, a common product requirement, with a single hook call; saved developer time and improved code readability.
• Created the TippingPopup component on the order-confirmation page.
• Fixed order savings calculation bugs, and gained experience reading complicated third-party documents.

July

• Rebranded to SuperShop.
• Investigated user migration procedure, ensuring a seamless transition to the new backend.
• ✨ Implemented Order Lookup endpoints and UI. This is the first major functional page that I developed independently.

August

• ✨ Integrated Rokt ads service. Created a minimalist component to deal with the complicated API. Before, developers had to go through the steps of library initialization, context creation, placement loading, and selection fetching, involving manipulating multiple obscure objects. Now, this can be achieved by writing only a few lines.
• ✨ Refactored order-confirmation page
• PayPal Buy-now-pay-later integration
• Product variant selection improvement
• Created /coupons page
• ✨ Fixed race condition

September

• Created Review-Request Drawer on the order-confirmation page
• Bing tracking implementation
• Created Product-added-to-cart page

October

• Trustpilot integration
• ✨ Created SuperCash promotion components
• Created Notify-price-drop button

November

• Implemented Google Enhanced Conversion tracking
• Created product breadcrumbs
• ✨ Implemented warranty endpoints and UI

December

• Nosto integration
• ✨ Created featured deal section and endpoints

January

• ✨ Created ProductTag
• Added Klaviyo email signup form
• ✨ Improved Nosto performance in mobile view
• ✨ Fixed memory leak issue
• Implemented home page redesign
• Added Vendor API trackings

February

• Refactored Riskified workflow
• Implemented the Featured Deal timer
• Implemented Product Detail page redesign
• Fixed product description text parsing
• Added home page anchors
• Updated GraphQL query to fetch more info
• ✨ Site speed improvement with SSR

March

• ✨ Fixed Riskified stability
• Implemented Sweepstakes new design
• Implemented Attentive tracking
• ✨ Fixed pod-eviction error due to static assets by implementing server-side rendering
• Added Super Membership registration UI
• ✨ Refactored purchase event webhooks to improve robustness
• ✨ Implemented a gather-and-scatter algorithm to reduce the data transfer for fetching home page recommendations.

April

• Implemented client-side logging
• Implemented Giveaway UI
• ✨ Investigated and fixed missing purchase tracking events
• Fixed errors caused by inventory out-of-stock, refactored product-detail page
• ✨ Fixed messy product typing
• ✨ Updated checkout iframe
• ✨ Fixed application error caused by browser compatibility
• Produced documentation and a presentation