What I Do at Microsoft - Software Engineer Intern Projects

Key Takeaways

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome back to another YouTube video. So in today's video, what I'm going to do is talk to you about what I actually work on at Microsoft as a software engineer intern. Now, I'm excited about this video and I think this is really cool because I can actually give you guys some really good insight into what it's like to work as a software engineer at a big tech company and what you actually do on a day-to-day basis. And the reason I'm able to do that and I'm actually going to be able to show you all of the code that I've written so far is because this is an open- source project. So I'm actually on the VS Code Python extension team working on data science related features. So VS Code is a very popular code editor. It looks like this. I'm sure you guys have seen it before if you're into programming at all. And it is one of the most popular code editors in the world, if not the most popular one. Within it, there's a bunch of things called extensions. So, actually, I should leave this up. Uh, if I come here and I go to the extensions pane, which is on the side here, you can see all of the extensions I have enabled. One of which is the Python extension. So, this right here, if you've installed this, you may potentially be seeing changes that I've actually made to this extension. So, the extension is essentially a way to support extra features, um, just other things in VS Code related normally to specific programming languages. But you can see here there's like a React extension. There's all these different kind of extensions. Some of them are produced by Microsoft and some of them are thirdparty extensions. But one of the reasons this is able to be open source is because, you know, it's not really a huge deal. It just is the Python extension for VS Code. So within that, there's a bunch of different areas. There's the core extension team. There's the language server team, which is responsible for doing all the IntelliSense and all of your code completions. And then there's the data science team, which I'm on. And the data science team is responsible for making data science features uh that help data scientists, right? So people that are working in machine learning and AI that are working with Jupyter notebooks and in fact I'm going to show you some of the features I'm working on in a second that are very heavily related to job Jupyter notebooks. Excuse me on that one. Uh but what I wanted to show you though is kind of how it works in terms of how do I actually push code? How do I figure out what to work on? How do we prioritize issues? I think that's a cool thing to show. So, I wanted to show you that we use GitHub for all of this. So, GitHub is a really powerful tool. I knew it was powerful, but not until I started working at Microsoft, which owns GitHub by the way, I realized how powerful it really is and how many things you can do with it. So, first of all, this is the repository. So, this is the entire codebase for the Python extension for Visual Studio Code. I'll put this in the description and you guys can go and look at this all you want. You can mess with it. You can actually contribute code and make a pull request if you wanted to. You can file issues if you notice things are wrong. And in fact, one of the ways that we actually figure out what to work on and what needs to be changed for future releases is by looking at this issues tab. So a lot of the issues that are here will actually be posted by external contributors. So those are people that are not a part of the Microsoft organization that come here and say, "Hey, I had an issue in VS Code with the Python extension. I need this fixed." And they file an issue. So, let me just click on one here and just see what this says. Failed to activate Jupiter or create empty notebook. So, you can see that this goes through a whole whack of Wow, I didn't realize that was going to be that long. U but just an issue that happened when this person was using our extension. So, you can see this is labeled data science type bug. Uh and it might be a part of a specific uh group or it might be organized in a certain way. And that's kind of the way that we figure out what's wrong and what we need to work on and what new features people want. If there's a issue that's come up a lot of times or a lot of people are upvoting it, then that's probably what we'll work on for the next release of VS Code. Again, I'm really just kind of a beginner here. This is my basic understanding and the senior guys could definitely tell you more than I could. Uh, but I think it's cool to understand that you can actually have a direct impact on what I potentially decide to work on. And then the pull request tab is the next one I wanted to show you. So, this is actually how you go about making a change to this code. So when you want to make a change, what you do is you submit a pull request. A pull request describes what you changed. It shows uh like why you changed it and what parts of the code you actually modified and then one of the senior developers on this team who has right access to the repository will come look at it, do a review of it, and then if it's all good, they'll give you a check mark. If it passes all our automated tests, you'll get a check and then you can actually merge this right into the codebase. So you yourself can actually make a change to the VS Code Python extension, assuming it's something that we want and you've done it properly. So let me go here now to actually one of the changes that I've made to show you what I mean by a pull request. So this was my I don't want to say my first pull request, maybe like my second or my third one. And this was to save the variable explorer height persistently. That's not going to mean much to you guys, but there is a variable explorer within VS Code. uh it was not resizable before which meant it stayed as kind of a static window and it was really annoying because it was quite large. So one of the first things I worked on was actually making that resizable and now making it so that it saves the height persistently so that when you come back into VS Code or you open a file where you've resized that pane it remembers uh where you resized it so that you don't have to keep resizing it and keeps resetting. So you can see I do a little description for what I changed. I give my checks for the things that are appropriate. And then you can look at all of the commits that I made. So these are commit messages from GitHub on my local machine. I added a label called skip news. Some people reviewed it. Uh requested some changes, wanted me to modify something. I made those changes. So addressed the comments and then I got approved, had two uh approvals here, and then all the way down here, I passed the code quality test. I passed a bunch of other automated tests which I think we can see here other than one PR validation but that's not a big deal. That's not an important test. And then I go went ahead and merged this into the master branch which means now this change is final and that everyone can see it that has the most recent version of this VS Code Python extension. So I think that's pretty cool. That's how I changed it. One cool thing to show you here is that if you go to checks or is it checks? No, sorry not checks. uh check shows you all the automated tests that they have set up to make sure that nothing breaks when you make a change. But if you go to files changed, you can actually see all of the code that I wrote. It's all highlighted in green and then anything that I deleted would be in red. So like that or anything that I potentially moved around. So anyways, that's enough for this. I want to actually show you what I work on on a day-to-day in terms of the code that I've been writing for the past week or two. And I think that's pretty cool. So let's go here. And you can see that I've actually have open the Python VS Code repository. It's not 100% up to date because I haven't merged the most recent changes or pulled the most recent changes. Uh but I have a few files open here. One of which is export manager. I'm currently working on this file. I'm start writing this one from scratch. And this is to actually export a Jupyter notebook to a PDF to HTML or to a Python script. So we want to have that kind of functionality. So, that's a project that I've started and that I'm going to be tackling for this next few weeks. Anyways, let me actually show you how we debug and kind of work in VS Code to work on VS Code because it's funny, right? I'm working on a VS Code extension and I'm using VS Code as my development environment. So, you can see that this is another instance of VS Code that I have open here and it says extension development host. What that means is this is kind of my debugging version of VS Code. This is one that I've built. So, there's a bunch of tasks running in the background here on VS Code. If I go to terminal, they're automatically compiling all of my changes. You can see 11 errors in this one. That's great. Uh, and serving them to this new VS Code window so that I can actually test out anything that I've changed. So, the first feature that I worked on, and this was kind of my like getting into the codebase, just getting used to things, was resizing this pane. So, make this resizable, which by the way was a lot harder than it looks. And then make it so that when you reopen it, it stays the same size. And if I save this file and reopen the file, it saves the height that we uh had the variable explorer at. So, that's the first change. And the next thing I'm working at is this export as um feature. So, if you go in VS Code right now and you click on this button, that won't show up. This is something that's just in my current codebase right here. And you can see I have Python script, HTML, PDF. And these are going to be the options that you have when you want to export something. So, let me make a change here and actually save this file. So, let's just save this as tester on my desktop. Let's make a change like that. Let's save. And actually, let's make another change. So, notice how it's unchanged. I'm going to go here and go HTML. And then we get a little popup down here. Uh, please save this file before exporting. Save. Save and don't show again or cancel. So, that's something that I've implemented as well is, you know, checking all this saving stuff. So, I'll hit save. Boom. And now it's going to ask me where I want to save my HTML and I can choose where I want it to go. And then I haven't finished most of that feature yet, but that's something that I'm working on. So, that is pretty much what I work on at Microsoft on a dayto-day. I could go in and show you way more, but I wanted to keep this video kind of short and just give you guys a little insight into what I'm actually doing and uh see kind of how cool it actually is because I think it's really interesting that you guys can go and view all of the changes that I'm actually making that I can show you all of this stuff and that you actually get an idea that as an intern I'm writing real code and I'm working on a product and features that you guys are actually going to be able to use and that you know millions of other people may be able to use in the future as well. So, with that being said, that has been this video. I hope you guys enjoyed. If you did, make sure to leave a like, subscribe, and I will see you all again in another YouTube video.