From June 2017 to June 2018, I undertook a placement year as part of my Computer Science degree, where I completed an internship working at a software company called Opsview Ltd. During this year I worked as a Junior Software Engineer in Opsview’s main office based in Reading, UK.
It was very important to me to take a placement year as part of my degree so that I could learn the industry I want to work in, and confirmed to me that being a software developer is a career that I will enjoy. It also means that I will graduate with a degree including a year in industry, which proves I have the experience and capability of working in software development, as well as the academic knowledge gained through my studies. My placement year also counts towards my final degree classification, and for the portfolio I created over the year I achieved 92%.
This was an incredibly rewarding experience for me to work in a software development team and apply my programming knowledge from my first two years at university. It gave me the opportunity to utilise my programming skills and apply them to developing for a real world software application. I believe I had good programming skills before my placement year, but now I have gained much more experience and confidence, which I can take into my final year of my studies at university, which begins in a few weeks time.
For my placement year I worked at Opsview Ltd, who develop IT monitoring solutions. My responsibility was writing integrations for their software that monitors the performance and system health of a variety of different technologies and applications. My integrations would be used as part of Opsview’s software to alert IT support teams on any issues within their IT infrastructure. I mainly developed these integrations in Python, Go and PowerShell.
My part of the product was to provide an IT administrator with everything they need to monitor their infrastructure automatically from the moment they install it, so required lots of investigation into exactly what customers want. This was a fantastic role for me as I was working with lots of different technologies, gaining valuable experience working in an agile environment and enhancing my programming skills in a variety of programming languages.
I worked in an agile software development team, using the Agile Scrum methodology on a daily basis. My role also involved using Linux every day, as well as various open source tools, such as Git, Gerrit, GitHub, Vagrant, OpenStack, Jenkins and JetBrains IDEs as part of my development environment. I was also required to investigate various aspects of customer requirements, document how my integrations worked and demonstrate my solutions to the engineering team, ensuring I provided efficient, high quality software.
During my year at Opsview, I won the employee of the quarter award, across the entire company, and twice won the employee of the month award within the engineering team. It was a fantastic year and great to work in a fun, fast-paced and rewarding environment.
Genaro Bedenko's Blog 