Goings on at Softwire, technical and otherwise

I started my internship at Softwire following my third year studying engineering at the University of Oxford. I arrived with almost no programming experience – only the material that Softwire had asked me to read in preparation for the summer, and a small amount of Matlab and C as part of my course. I wanted to use the internship both for experience, but also to learn what working in software was actually like.

During my internship I’ve worked on three different projects, all very different in scale, technology and structure. My first project was an internal app for Softwire itself, rather than a commercial one – the idea was to increase company productivity by making employees’ personal development records and yearly appraisal much more streamlined. It was a .NET MVC app written in C#, and we had two interns as the sole developers – with a couple of more experienced people keeping an eye on things, and giving us the support we needed when we encountered problems.

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I am currently doing a summer internship at Softwire, and then going back to university for the final year of my course (a 3 year Computer Science course at University of Manchester).

Before starting at Softwire, all of my previous programming experience was from university and high-school projects. In particular, I hadn’t worked on a ‘real’ software development project before. It turns out that these offer very different challenges to academic projects but can be really enjoyable to work on.

Working on such projects at Softwire proved to myself that this is what I want to do in the future – I really want to follow a career in software development.

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As a third year Computer Science student at Oxford with a reasonable amount of previous programming experience, I was already fairly sure that I wanted to work in software development when I applied for an internship at Softwire. I’d heard about the company from a friend and the friendly and relaxed atmosphere combined with the wide variety of projects that Softwire work on particularly appealed to me.

My first project was to build a website to allow employees of a hotel chain to create a design for a London 2012 Olympics key card. This was a small project with only a few people working on it so I could definitely see that my contributions made a difference. All the technologies we used (C# and ASP.net MVC) were new to me but there was always someone on hand to help me if I had any problems.

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I was a developer intern at Softwire for three months, in the summer before starting my third year of mathematics at Cambridge – I had dabbled in programming for a long time but only amateurishly, and I wanted to experience software development at a professional level. I applied to Softwire because it was small and friendly yet had worked on projects for some prestigious corporations (the BBC, Microsoft, Serco, Telegraph Media Group).

The focus here is on getting things done, and by the end of my first day I had already started work on my first project, which was to upgrade the database access layer of the Timesheet Application, an internal application used to record how every employee spends their time and to calculate how well projects are going to plan. Most of the cutting-edge technology was new to me and I had never seen so many lines of code before, but within weeks I was progressing confidently through the tasks.

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