Tasia, a Computer Science student at the University of Washington, shares her experiences as the first intern at Pulumi, a startup company. She chose Pulumi for its startup environment, knowledgeable engineering team, and a product she found compelling, along with competitive compensation and learning opportunities. During her internship, she worked across the company’s Service and Platform Teams, contributing to projects such as adding support for tags and Docker images, and updating code generation tools for Pulumi 2.0. Despite the challenges of remote work, Tasia learned valuable lessons, including the benefits of writing tests before code and the complexities of cloud infrastructure. Her time at Pulumi was unexpectedly organized and mature, contrary to her expectations of startup chaos, and she left with a strong sense of accomplishment and excitement for the future.