OnX Maps Internship

During the summer of 2023, I had the honor of interning with OnX Maps. The company is building a suite of GPS mapping apps for a wide range of outdoor activities including hiking, offroading, hunting and backcountry skiing. I really enjoyed the company culture at OnX as I found myself surrounded by a bunch of outdoorsy, passionate engineers. A Monday morning never went by without photos of jaw dropping weekend adventures and everyone had exciting stories to tell. The team was so passionate about the product they were making and the apps are truly being built in the office during the week and used by the team in the field over the weekend.

The Android Team

While at OnX, I was placed on the Routing and Navigation team as an Android developer. I had never worked with Andorid development or Kotlin and had never had the opportunity to test out an Android device so there was a lot of new ground to cover. That created a really fun and challenging learning curve and I thoroughly enjoyed diving into it! OnX did an excellent job setting their interns up for success by matching us with mentors on our teams and giving us projects that we could see through to production. I took the opportunity to join my mentor on an internal rewrite of the Android Auto (in dash display in your car) companion app which allows users to see their customized maps while on the road. I had the great fortune of joining the project just as it was getting off the ground, so I was able to be heavily involved in the design process, establishing the architecture for the different screens of the app. While my internship ended before the rewrite was completed, it has since hit the market!

Hiking and app testing with another intern

The experience with OnX went far beyond work however. One of the highlights of my summer was their annual company retreat in Big Sky, Montana. Since the pandemic, the company has embraced remote work and has a workforce spread across much of the US. Once a year they bring everyone together for team bonding, company updates and outdoor skills workshops. They were incredibly kind and invited their college interns to join the retreat and we spent 3 days getting to know our colleagues, each other, and playing a lot of corn hole.

The interns