Intern Gino develops the Kotlin Multiplatform SDK

Gino, a student at the Vienna University of Technology, spent the summer of 2023 as a software engineer intern with the Mobile SDK team. We asked him to share a little about what he worked on and why he chose Sentry for his internship.

Developing the Kotlin Multiplatform SDK

I was part of the Mobile SDK team which is responsible for the development of the Mobile SDKs.

I’ve had different projects but the biggest one was developing the Kotlin Multiplatform SDK. This fit very well into Sentry’s mission of helping every developer by also supporting new technology.

Kotlin Multiplatform is a new cross-platform framework that allows developers to share code between their apps with Kotlin. The project’s goal was to create a Sentry SDK for this framework.

It was quite challenging since the technology was still not stable so the API and the developer experience were not perfect yet, and we had to work around a lot of issues.

While developing the SDK was a challenge, something that was even harder was figuring out how to release it. Our SDKs release process are handled via Sentry’s central tool called Craft. Since Kotlin Multiplatform also produces artifacts that could not be handled by Craft I had to add support for that. However, since I couldn’t test an actual deployment I was not 100 percent sure if my code was working so it was a process with a lot of back and forth - add changes to Craft, test if the release worked, if not then try again.

After the successful release I’ve then had a great opportunity in being part of a podcast hosted by JetBrains talking about the Kotlin Multiplatform SDK with one of our Senior engineers.

It was a great project and also sparked an interest in using Kotlin Multiplatform myself.

Why Gino chose Sentry

When searching for internship opportunities, my main goal was to gain experience in a tech environment that innovates, but I also wanted to stay in Vienna. Sentry emerged as the ideal option, being the only company in Vienna that offered the unique blend of innovative tech culture with the opportunity for interns to contribute meaningfully.

About Gino's time as an intern

The internship was a great experience that had the perfect amount of support and being able to work things out on my own. When I was really stuck on a problem people were there to help me or forward me to the people who know best about the problem.

Also, my team tried to include me into all of the regular meetings as much as possible so I can still be part of the regular processes even though I was not actively working with anyone directly from the team.

I really enjoyed the internship and Sentry is a company that spends a lot of resources making all the people comfortable and valued for the work. I really enjoyed all the activities we did - not only with our team but also the events that were hosted by Sentry.

Make sure you check out some of the openings we have here at Sentry for internships and full-time positions.