Engineering spotlight: Marie-Laure Bardonnet

Datadog’s Notebooks feature demonstrates that interns can make substantial contributions when given meaningful ownership and effective mentorship. Marie-Laure Bardonnet progressed from small bug fixes to prototyping the feature, gaining hands-on experience with React, Redux, and Redux Saga. Her experience ultimately led to continued part-time work and a full-time role at Datadog.

From Bug Fixes to Feature Ownership

• Marie-Laure initially handled small issues, such as fixing a dashboard favorite-star interaction.
• Gradually more complex tasks helped her learn Datadog’s codebase and application architecture.
• Rather than limiting her to routine maintenance, Datadog assigned her a major project earlier than expected.

Building Datadog Notebooks

• Notebooks let users save graphs from a specific point in time alongside text and other contextual information.
• The feature is designed to preserve and share organizational knowledge, helping teams respond more quickly.
• Marie-Laure built most of the prototype during her seven-month internship.
• The project introduced her to:
  • React for the frontend
  • Redux for state management
  • Redux Saga for handling side effects

The Role of Mentorship

• Team lead Ivan DiLernia gave Marie-Laure substantial autonomy while remaining available for difficult architectural decisions.
• He encouraged her to investigate ideas independently, then collaborated with her when problems required deeper discussion.
• Marie-Laure identified this balance between independence and guidance as one of the most valuable parts of the internship.

Lasting Impact

• The internship changed how Marie-Laure viewed her academic coursework, helping her distinguish practical engineering skills from more theoretical material.
• After returning to France, she continued working part-time on Notebooks and other web-platform projects.
• She later completed her studies and accepted a full-time position at Datadog.

Datadog’s experience suggests that internships are most effective when they combine gradual onboarding, meaningful technical ownership, and thoughtful mentorship rather than restricting interns to low-impact tasks.