Saying goodbye to our Interns, James and Filip … and hello to our new part time team members!
Over the last few months we’ve been lucky enough to work with two very skilled and determined interns in James and Filip. Reaching out to us early on in the summer they asked if they could have an internship which showed a degree of dedication and motivation that we couldn’t refuse.
This would prove to be a great opportunity for both the interns and The Curve as whilst the interns would gain a great amount of experience and real world programming knowledge, The Curve would have extra programming capabilities.
A vital area of the interns’ work also consisted of developing features and addressing bugs in multiple projects whilst shipping code to production throughout the development process.
We were delighted, seeing the value gained from having the interns on board and members of the team was undeniable.
This is what the interns had to say about how they found their summer internship at The Curve and what their next steps will be, after joining us on a part time basis.
James “I reached out to the curve last December as I wanted an internship over the summer after my first year at university, most larger companies struggle to offer anything to students that are not entering their final year at university shortly after, so I chose to reach out to some smaller companies, The Curve being one of the companies I reached out to. The Curve has a great online presence and I liked the look of the type of work they carried out.
After mine and Paul Ridgways first interaction over email, I was tasked to a small coding assessment for Paul to gauge my technical ability, this was a small photo gallery web application, Paul requested this be written in Ruby on Rails, I had never written any Ruby code prior to this so was a good challenge.
Paul Ridgway was incredibly helpful way before I started at the curve, regularly giving me advice and insight over email.
I started my Internship at the end of June, from day 1 I have been working on client projects and getting a true insight into how software is built and delivered. My rails skills have massively improved alongside other technologies such as Docker and JavaScript.
I have built some incredible relationships with colleagues whilst working for the curve and could not recommend the company enough for anyone wanting to gain some real world experience within software.”
Filip “The first time I heard about The Curve was thanks to a friend of mine, who did an internship at the company a few years ago and was really satisfied with his overall experience, which encouraged me to do my own research about the company. I was really impressed by the magnificent impact of the company in the software engineering industry within the region and the country. I did not hesitate and sent an email with my application to The Curve.
I exchanged a couple of emails with Paul Ridgway, who was really helpful to answer all my questions and also accepted my application to become a summer intern. I want to emphasise the fact that The Curve was the only company that responded to my emails regularly and considerably quickly. I cannot appreciate it enough, since I was ignored by many companies because of being a first-year student. The smooth communication with The Curve was a great sign of respect from their side which gave me a good initial impression. Soon before starting, I had an in-person meeting with Paul to discuss internship details, talk about Computer Science concepts and, as it turned out, about some common hobbies.
I started my internship in the middle of June and it lasted for about 2 months. During my first week, I was mainly getting familiar with some new technologies that I never used before, such as Docker and TypeScript, by working on some existing internal tooling app written in Ruby on Rails. From the second week onwards, I was assigned to work on a real-client project collaborating with other software engineers at the company. It’s been a really valuable experience, which gave me an opportunity to significantly boost my skills in Rails, JavaScript, Docker and database related tasks/technologies. One of the features that I developed in the app is a fully functional calendar integrated with the backend, which enabled me to get familiar with several new APIs.
Furthermore, I got to know new project management tools (e.g. Jira) and expanded my GitHub-related knowledge by working on many branches, rebasing, resolving conflicts, or getting familiar with GitHub actions. Above all, my internship at The Curve was a great time to meet new friends and work among outstanding professionals who supported me through the time, and I cannot be thankful enough for the advice that I received!
To sum up, being a Software Engineering Intern at The Curve was an amazing experience and I have to say I cannot imagine a better start of my career in the IT industry! It’s been really a wonderful time to meet and work in such a professional and friendly environment, as well as to learn a lot of new software engineering concepts while working on real-world projects. I am happy to have the opportunity to continue my journey with The Curve working as a part-time software engineer – I am looking forward to seeing what the future brings!”