Intern Success Story: Amaan Ashraf

At NaviParking, we believe in the power of mentorship. Our internships are designed in such a way that engineers who are at the start of their careers have access to the knowledge and the support, but also with a certain degree of freedom and independence, necessary to thrive and to polish their skills. One of our interns, Amaan Ashraf, has just finished his three-month internship and is now taking on the role of Junior Support Engineer.

Amaan’s first day at NaviParking was January 31, 2021, when he began his internship as an Engineering Support Intern. As his mentor, Wassim Bouchiha prepared an onboarding plan with all his responsibilities in the UAE as a Product Owner and as a support role and went through all the products in detail from NaviParking Enterprise to NaviPay and explained all the tools he will have access to, such as Jira.

“We discussed the business model and current backlog of NaviPay and all the current projects, with a focus on the NMC Medical Centre project in Sharjah,” Wassim says. “I also introduced him to everyone and explained their positions, so he would know who to address questions to and who to ask for help in case I am unable to help him, such as with programming things. I also highlighted the significance of communication. It’s important to keep track and plan the tasks, and what has to be done in a week to plan and when it comes to reporting the progress in Jira, I explained how he can comment on all the tasks that are assigned to him.”

Amaan’s first week primarily consisted of meetings with his mentor, Wassim, who took him through everything and set him up with credentials. 

“From the beginning, I felt very welcome, and it was easy to feel part of the team,” Amaan explains. “Everyone was making me feel comfortable, and they were walking me through it all. It’s not like when you join a big multinational firm, and they just have this set of practices they take you through in the name of training. Here, they also let me explore things by myself and provided me with a certain degree of freedom in that aspect, but then again also pointed me in the right direction, so that I wasn’t lost from the get-go. The right mix of guidance and freedom in figuring out what I had to do was very beneficial for me.” 

This is Amaan’s first job in the technology industry. Before joining the NaviParking team, he studied Computer Science at the Vidya Academy of Science and Technology in India. Although he had the chance to study in UAE, he felt the need to get in touch with his roots so he chose to study in India. However, before college, he didn’t know he would end up in IT, but rather focused on his love of football and hoped to play professionally in the future. “I poured everything into football. In 12th grade, we won the states. And I was able to represent my school for the nationals too. For the first two years of college, I played football. Then I had a knee injury and I had to stop. I enjoyed my best years in school as a player. I still play, but I stopped playing it on a competitive level after that injury. Now I just play for fun because it’s something I’m really passionate about.” 

In school, he also took up the responsibility of being the student representative of the entire student body, which totalled up to around 4,500 students. “This was my first time in such a position, so I had to learn as I went. When you’re dealing with faculty and students, it can be quite challenging, but I really liked that challenge.” 

When he was applying to universities, he figured that since he was interested in computers, he would take on the challenge of pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Despite only having a base of knowledge from high school, he thrived at school and suddenly felt like working in the technology industry was something he could definitely do and something he could enjoy. 

His graduation project was creating a tracking system of buses at the university that let students know where exactly the bus they’re waiting for is and notify them if it’s going to be late. It involved hardware installed in the buses and an app that enabled students to look at the location of a bus. The original plan was to collect data to optimise the routes, but the COVID19 pandemic got in the way of that, so Amaan and his team members improvised and implemented a solution where they used APIs instead of installing hardware on the bus. They designed a software solution for the bus drivers to have on their phones that enabled location sharing to students.

Another project he worked on was a system of notifying medical staff when a patient’s glucose levels drop. The system was based on the weight of the patients and if their levels dropped below a certain threshold, the medical staff onsite would receive SMS alerts.

After moving back to the UAE, Amaan met Marek Stawiński, CEO and Founder of NaviParking, who offered him an internship. Amaan says working with Marek “offers a new perspective to you as a person. All this knowledge and all this experience that he has gained over years is incredible. Even when you’re discussing basic things not related to work, every time you talk to Marek something new rubs off on you, because he has so much to offer.” 

Amaan initially worked with Wassim to find errors and bugs on the NaviPay app and then switched over to mainly working on the company’s internal beacon maintenance app, which initially did not allow users to set up a new account. He set up the forgotten password flow, so customers no longer have to call contact support, but instead they can reset it by themselves, which in his mentor’s Wassim eyes is Amaan’s biggest accomplishment so far. He was also given the opportunity to go through Flutter. Before, he only had some base knowledge of it, but NaviParking CTO Bartosz gave him the chance to play around with the tool and see how well he would be able to learn Flutter. “It was a learning opportunity more than anything,” Amaan says. 

You cannot grow yourself without growing others. It is an essential aspect of your job, no matter what engineering role you take. Sooner or later, every engineer comes to the point where learning technology is no longer an issue in their role, but growing others becomes a key element for their role and their team.

Bartosz Czerwiński

CTO

Another product Amaan has worked on during his internship was an internal tool used to compile data of prospects. Initially, these databases had a lot of fields that were being left empty, and the first thing Amaan did was add fields in which those values that were required would be added automatically.

As of May 1, Amaan has officially taken up the role of Junior Support Engineer. Half his role is to still be a support engineer, and the other part is helping out the NaviParking Enterprise team where he’s working as a tester. Right now, he’s working closely with our Java Backend Developer, Shraddha Dable, on making our internal tooling more user friendly. He’s making it possible for the backend engineering team to have access to data without adding much fuss to the user.

He’s also responsible for extracting data on a daily basis for the smart parking solution recently implemented in NMC Medical Centre in Sharjah, UAE. 

“Essentially, my job is a Support Engineer,” Amaan explains. “In case there’s something, if anyone needs quick support either from a customer perspective or in case we’re having some errors that need to be dealt with quickly, I’ve been provided access with our monitors. I can take a look at the error quickly and come up with a diagnosis of what’s happening.”

Despite already having such a significant impact on the company, Amaan wants to continue improving and take on more responsibilities. “I’m not contributing as much as I’d like to,” Amaan states. “Even now, it’s a learning process where I’m still getting to know stuff since the support role is kind of fairly new. The goal of this role is to provide support on an all-around basis. At least kind of be like the first response team in case something happens from a customer perspective. And if a customer has an issue, I report it to the engineering team.” 

The hard skills Amaan developed under Wassim’s mentorships include 

• Polishing data management skills when it comes to handling the database queries and learning how to extract information from a third party database, how to analyse the data and how to produce reports out of this data 
• Expanding his knowledge of APIs
• Learning Javascript through implementing missing features in an internal tool
• Building on his base knowledge of Flutter and getting hands-on experience 

As for soft skills, he was primarily able to improve his teamwork skills, particularly when it comes to remote work. “I’m learning more about how to work in a team,” Amaan says. “Earlier in an educational environment and school environment, even when you have a team, you mostly work with your close friends, so there’s a lot of flexibility there. When it comes to teams here, there is stuff that you have to be accountable for and have to be responsible in that aspect.” 

“The entire team went out of their way to make me feel comfortable,” Amaan continues. “They were constantly reaching out and asking me if I’m alright and if I need anything. I’ve received a lot of support in that aspect. But the thing about working from home is that it’s kind of disorienting, right? Initially, it was disorienting. If you had to be somewhere, you show up, you leave. But since you work at home, if you start at 9 am, maybe you wake up at 8:55 am. What I like is that the hours are flexible. As long as you put in the hours and complete your tasks, nobody apprehends you to be working from this time to this time. As long as your responsibilities are being taken care of, you can work the hours of your choice.”

Wassim praises Amaan for his curiosity when it comes to learning the products and digging deeper into company archives and documentation so he’s aware of everything and for seeking help whenever it’s needed from everyone on the team. “He’s incredibly hardworking, committed and hungry for knowledge, works long hours and is always ready to help and to provide support where it is needed,” Wassim says. “He’s very energetic and always ready to do more, constantly exceeding expectations.” 

For Amaan, feeling like part of the team is very important. “I like to be among people, especially if I’m working with someone. I like to get to know them more on a personal basis. I’ve made some attempts to do that. I met with Maciej Cichoński. I scheduled the call for 30 minutes and it went on for an hour or so because we kept on talking. And more recently I met with Kamil Kożuchowski. Kamil was supposed to explain how to prioritise bugs on Jira. We got through that really quickly and then we kept talking and that went on for an hour or so.” Right now, Amaan is living in Fujairah, about 118 kilometres from Dubai and he hopes to be on site a lot more and finally meet the team in person. “I just got my visa so I can go to Dubai and meet the MENA team in person, so I’m excited. So far, I’ve only met Marek in person.” 

As far as his other goals for the future, he says, “the first step is to improve myself, to improve my technical skills. I’ve been doing it, but it’s a process. I want to contribute more to the company. The next step is to spend more time on-site and help Wassim at the NMC Medical Centre, where our Pay by QR solution is implemented. Bartosz has already defined the career path and how I can progress from the support role, so that’s really great. He took the initiative to move me to the NPE team for testing as well, so I’m being well taken care of. I’d like to repay that faith. I’m not setting a very specific goal but I want to take on more responsibilities and contribute more. Since I’ve been given this platform I’m going to keep learning, and if I improve the system by learning then it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”

The pandemic disrupted Amaan’s life outside of work, since going out and playing football is a little bit more difficult to do now. When he moved back to UAE, he realised he also does not have a lot of people to play with, since the friends he used to have in UAE all left Fujairah and now live somewhere else. Still, he is slowly managing to make new friends, with whom he hangs out in the evenings and visits Fujairah’s picturesque hills and beaches. He also started going to the gym a lot more often. “I never saw myself as a person who works out just for the sake of working out. Before, pursuing fitness came from playing football. Now, I have a lot of free time on my hands, so I’ve been going to the gym and using this free time to continue improving myself.” 

Amaan discovered another interest during the lockdown. “I picked up playing the piano during the pandemic because of boredom. In India, my sister used to play but then she lost interest. Since I was stuck at home, one day I thought I’d give this thing a try. Right now, I can play a few of my favourite songs, and I’m learning a little bit of music theory. Unfortunately, I had to leave the piano in India. When I get my first paycheck, I’ll buy a piano for myself.”

Mentorship is and will continue to be a huge part of working at NaviParking. Although Wassim was a mentor to Amaan, which he sees as an incredible experience that taught him a lot, he believes that he himself is also mentored by the CTO, Bartosz. “Bartosz is everyone’s mentor,” Wassim says. “He brought a big change to the company. Whenever you ask him a question from any field, he can answer it. And he has very strong communication skills. When you talk to him he’s very technical, but also has the right communication. A lot of people are really good at technical things but not at communicating complicated concepts in clear simplified terms. He knows how to discuss things just as clearly with the business team as he does with the engineering team, which is important for me to learn.” 

To future interns of NaviParking, Amaan’s advice is to “mentally prepare yourself to be 100% committed to what we’re doing here because that’s the tone set by the rest of the team. It is evident from their work ethic. Also, learn from the sense of ownership that the rest of the team exhibits towards our products. I feel this is important because every release and every update is celebrated here.”