I have had two internships with Zillow. As an iOS front-end developer, I was involved in the day-to-day work of full-time employees.
I started without any mobile development experience, but my first internship, from May to August 2018, turned out to be smooth and successful. I started with fixing issues in core shopping components (the list view, the map view, home detailed pages, etc) to increase the shopping experience of buyers and renters. I added support for displaying Canada listings in Zillow’s App. I explored client-side features to show home recommendations in the map view and list cards.
I worked as a designer iOS developer for my Hackweek project, which was the prototype of Tour It Now, the self-guided home tour. I learned to balance between cool features and time limits, to balance between what looks fancy and what is practical.
In February, I went back to the same team and dove right in quickly. I fixed bugs including a top crash bug related to the photo browser. As part of Zillow’s rebrand, I implemented new filters to enhance users’ searching experience. One of the most valuable experiences I have ever had is participating in the re-architecture of the main filters in Zillow’s App. I learned the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and contributed to the existing MVVM framework.