This summer, Conello’s interns have jumped into meaningful work quickly, contributing to product development, team process, and creative problem-solving in ways that have exceeded expectations.
What’s been especially exciting is how much ownership this group has taken from the start. Rather than being limited to small, low-risk tasks, interns have been trusted with real bugs, real product questions, and real opportunities to collaborate. They’ve been asked not only to experiment with solutions, but to explain their thinking, demo their work, and grow through the process.
That trust has paid off. The team has developed a strong working rhythm through sprint kickoffs, retros, and day-to-day collaboration. They’ve been active in shaping process, thoughtful in how they work together, and engaged in shipping work on time. Their onboarding experience was also a bright spot, with Jira tickets providing a clear structure for getting started.
More than anything, this group has embodied the spirit of Owning It. There’s a real sense that they care about what they’re building and want to contribute to something meaningful.
The interns are currently helping shape features focused on asynchronous games and icebreaker nudges: lightweight ways to build engagement and connection without requiring teams to pause everything for a live activity. That work captures a lot of what this program is about: thoughtful experimentation, creativity, and building tools that make work more human.
It’s also been a joyful reminder of what’s possible when early-career engineers are given both support and room to grow! To honor that, we’d love to feature them and their thoughtful interview questions here.
1. What is your professional super power?
Communication – to not settle for answers and ensure complete understanding is met through thorough communication. Whether it is the other party that receives complete understanding, or if it is even myself that is confused and requires complete understanding, I strive to meet those standards via communication. Under situations where I am not understanding design specs, or criteria for projects, I will utilize questions and the source of multiple team members to achieve more clarification and complete understanding.
– Jonathan U
Adaptability: I consider myself quite good at figuring out the tools I’ve never used in order to start working right away just by looking through the tool usage examples. This projects presents me with the tools I’ve never used or used rarely, giving me a chance to use this skill
Curiosity: New and interesting projects give me a spark to create, boosting my productivity overall, and this project is definitely new and interesting to me!– Artur Agalarian
My professional super power is showing up consistently and doing the work, even when it’s not glamorous work. I’m good at taking tickets start to finish, digging into bugs and steady making progress.
– Rafael Puente
I bridge software engineering and IT/sysadmin work, most people specialize in one or the other but I’ve built real experience in both. On the dev side I can build full stack apps (Flask, GCP, Docker) and I bring systems thinking from managing infrastructure at PSU OIT (imaging, device management, network troubleshooting). That means I can build something and actually understand how it’ll run in production.
– Joshua Brown
2. What excites you most about joining the team?
One of the things that got me really excited to work here is the fast development environment of utilizing AI to innovate the codebase. After being in an education environment where AI and fast integration of codebases were advised against, and even against academic integrity policies, utilizing this as a tool allows more creativity to be given back to the developer – to rapidly develop and integrate and innovate with lesser downtime. This is what I am excited about.
– Jonathan U
It’s exciting to join a start-up as a software developer in a team, as it would provide me with the non-stressful working experience in a growing project.
– Artur Agalarian
What excites me the most about joining the team is the chance to work on a real product with real users and to learn from people in anyway I can learn more about the development process and implement as many working features as I can.
– Rafael Puente
I got involved with Conello during my CS capstone as team lead and software engineer, and what stuck with me was how much ownership I had over real decisions instead of just checking boxes on a class project. Joining as an intern means I get to keep building on something I already believe in, with a team that trusted a student to lead from day one.
– Joshua Brown
3. What does community mean to you?
Community is a place where individuals with similar interests and goals are able to converge and interact with one another in a respectful or production fashion.
– Jonathan U
Community to me is shown through common goals and willingness to work together to achieve those goals by building each other up.
– Artur Agalarian
Community to me is a group of people who share goals, help each other get unstuck and give honest feedback while still wanting each other to succeed.
– Rafael Puente
Community is people who show up for each other consistently, not just when it’s convenient. It’s less about proximity and more about whether people actually have your back when things get hard, and whether you’re willing to do the same for them.
– Joshua Brown
4. How do you currently “find your people” at work?
It definitely takes me some time to get warm and comfortable within an environment and to attach onto individuals within a team. I typically get through this process by working hard to earn the respect of others.
– Jonathan U
Quite easy, since the scope of the people at Conello is small, there are just a handful people to get to know well! It’s easy to find people with common interests and expertise to match yours
– Artur Agalarian
People who care about what they do and the impact they have.
– Rafael Puente
5. What’s a dream for the future of work that you’d love to see come true?
The dream that I have for work is being able to build a future that is able to sustain any lifestyle that I see fit for myself, where that can grow and shrink in response to the change in my lifestyle demands.
– Jonathan U
More games! Would love to have the team-building games to be completed and be the lead for at least one of those games.
– Artur Agalarian
My dream for the future of work is a setup where I can work from anywhere and still feel fully connected to my team.
– Rafael Puente
I’d love to see more workplaces stop treating “IT” and “engineering” as separate worlds. The best solutions come from people who understand both the code and the systems it runs on, and right now most orgs silo those skill sets instead of building people who can move between them.
– Joshua Brown
Learn more about these rockstars at conello.com/about
