What’s It Like Working at Onymos?

I’m currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, going into my sophomore year. I joined Onymos as an intern this past August. I had some prior experience using Python and Java but not much experience with web and mobile development technologies.

Working at Onymos gave me a better understanding of the challenges facing mobile development. Onymos is specifically creating solutions that make developers’ lives easier.

I didn’t really know what to expect from my internship. I hoped that I would get to work with others and grow as a software developer, and that’s exactly what I got. The team was super supportive, and I got valuable feedback on my work (thanks, Jamie!) as soon as I finished. 

Demos, keyboards, and quirks

I was tasked with building a demo app to showcase how Onymos features work on various mobile development platforms, ranging from React Native to Swift to Ionic. From my experience building these apps, I noticed that each framework has its own unique quirks that make even relatively straightforward-seeming tasks more difficult.

For instance, just building a text input that would rise into view when the virtual keyboard popped up was surprisingly difficult. Not only were some simple tasks like this problematic, but the solutions were completely different across each platform I built my apps on. Solving them all took a lot of my time.

Similarly, building app features to log in, share media, and chat takes precious time and resources away from companies that are just getting started. Not only that, but these features are all different across the various platforms, so it can be hard to come by a standardized way of doing things.

This is where Onymos shines: with out-of-the-box features that do exactly what you need them to. It makes app development that much easier. For example, when building an app that needs to have social messaging, there’s no need for the developer to reinvent the wheel. Onymos already has a chat feature and abstracted away all the time-consuming research, complexity, and bug-fixing that would normally be involved.

New dev → Experienced dev

As a new developer myself, working at Onymos gave me invaluable mobile development skills and an opportunity to get internship experience early on. I really enjoyed the workplace culture: the company-wide personal update meetings were a lot of fun, and I especially appreciated hearing directly from senior leadership, including CEO Shiva Nathan.

In the future, I’d love to get into more mobile and web development. I am also looking forward to learning about artificial intelligence and other fun computer science topics in college this year. It was very useful getting to learn the basics of JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React Native, and I’ve definitely matured as a software developer in my time here.

I’m glad I was able to contribute to the work and look forward to seeing the new heights that Onymos will reach!