For the past eight months, Collabware has hosted a student intern who has assisted us on several key projects. As part of her final week, we have asked her to write a blog about her experiences here at Collabware to share with everyone.
Hello, my name is Lisa. I am a fourth year computer science student at the University of British Columbia and am wrapping up the last few days of my internship at Collabware.
Time flies, it feels like yesterday when I arrived for my first day of work. At that time, the only relevant knowledge I had was a bit of c# coding picked up from learning Unity. I am very fortunate to have an awesome supervisor Ryan Jaeger, a senior developer here, who gives me feedback through code reviews and guides me through the journey as I learn the c# language, SharePoint and the Collabware API. The most rewarding part of work was being able to make tools that are being used by others. This has started to increase my self-confidence as I realize that through hard work and help from others I am capable of accomplishing more than I think I can.
I have learned valuable technical and communication skills beyond what is taught at school during these eight months. Most people think a developer’s job only involves coding by yourself in a cubicle and being isolated from others. In reality, programming is a social activity. The code we write involves a lot of communication in order for it to work as whole, since it is written by many different people and is only put together in the end.
It was an eye opener to experience the agile process, the developing process used here at Collabware, on a bigger scale. At school, we only discuss our progress with a couple of other students and the Teacher's Assistant. At Collabware, we meet weekly to do a sprint review, retrospective, and planning session. We also have daily scrum meetings to update everyone on the status of our tasks. All these meetings ensure that we are aware of what the other team members are working on and makes us feel accountable to the success of the team.
Outside of work, I also got the chance to get to know my co-workers better through having lunch and meaningful conversations on how they worked hard and followed their passion to get where they are today. This inspires me to continue working harder towards my dreams.
Now it’s time to finish up my last pieces of code and head back to school for another eight months!
Thank you for reading,
Lisa Wong