My Software Developer Internship at Codesmith sat on the Calipy product—think appointment scheduling and communication where email is not a nice-to-have, it is part of the contract with users. The scope was classical backend product work with a strong emphasis on correctness and reliability.
Email workflows that carry real state
A large part of the internship was improving how the system talks to users around appointments. That meant handling confirmations, cancellations, and updates with the right context and attachments so messages stay actionable instead of vague. When email is wrong, users miss meetings or show up at the wrong time—so the details matter.
ICS generation and calendar interoperability
I automated generation of ICS calendar files so invites could land in users’ calendars in a standard way. It sounds small until you deal with time zones, updates, and the subtle expectations different mail clients have. Getting this right reduces support noise and makes the product feel “native” to how people already work.
Protobuf, Go, and SQLC
On the service side, I worked with Protocol Buffers and integrated PostgreSQL with Go using SQLC. The payoff is familiar to anyone who has been burned by stringly-typed SQL in a large codebase: generated, type-safe queries catch mistakes at compile time and make refactors less scary. That pattern—schema first, generated boundaries—has stayed with me in later roles.
What I took away
The internship reinforced a few habits I still lean on: treat notifications and side effects as part of the feature, not an afterthought; invest in types at system boundaries; and optimize for the user’s mental model of “what should happen next” when they read an email or open a calendar event.