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.
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