Meet the Splunktern: Het Kataria

In this next installment of our “Meet the Splunktern'' series, we’re featuring Het Kataria, one of our Software Engineer interns on the Mission Control Extension Frameworks team. Het currently attends the University of Waterloo studying Computer Science, and is in his co-op term. Recently, Het was named Splunktern of the Month! Read on to learn more about Het and his story at Splunk.

How would you describe your Splunk internship? Awesome! I really enjoy working on my intern project and with my team — they’re all super nice and great to work with. My intern project has also been both challenging and rewarding, as I’ve worked on the frontend with React, an area and technology I haven’t worked with before. Overall it’s been great, and it’s definitely bittersweet that my internship is coming to an end.

What has been the most memorable experience you have had in your internship? Either meeting my team for lunch or going out for drinks with fellow interns. It’s been tough socially over the past year, so it was awesome to finally meet people outside of Zoom!

What is a work-related accomplishment that you are most proud of? I’m most proud of finishing my intern project, which was to create a UI editor to create plugins. Before the project, plugins were tedious to create, and it involved getting dirty with code and having some technical context. However, my project has removed the need to work with code directly, and made the process much more time efficient.

What was your journey like getting to Splunk? It’s been pretty long! This is my last co-op, having done 4 software development co-ops in the past at a few different companies. They’ve all been in different roles though (e.g. mobile, backend), so being able to do a lot of frontend work at Splunk has been super educational for me.

What is the best career advice you have ever received? To learn how the whole system works. It’s pretty easy to just focus on your project or team, but looking broader at the organization or even the company as a whole and seeing how the different parts work together is much more rewarding and helpful.

How do you prefer to end your day? With at least 30 minutes of reading! I prefer fiction to non-fiction though — there’s just too many cool stories out there.

Want to learn more about the Splunk Internship Program? Visit our Splunk University Recruiting Facebook Page and LinkedIn, or check out open Splunktern opportunities.