Author: Naomi Obbard

Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Let’s hear from Christopher:

Tell me about yourself!

My name is Christopher and I am currently studying Physics, Maths and Computer Science. I’ve been doing a fair amount of programming for around 4 or 5 years at home, mainly self-taught. I’ve also learnt a lot from my Dad who works as a Software and Hardware Engineer and my Grandad who is a Physicist. Outside of coding, I’ve been teaching myself to play guitar for the last year.

When did you first become interested in coding?

It was Christmas 2018 – I’d been given a coding task from my Computer Science teacher at school to make a simple game (Battleships) and I found it really interesting. As I was working on it, I got thinking how I could make it better, so I added databasing and networking functionality to it.

What’s your favourite project you’ve worked on?

The most enjoyable things for me are the functionality improvements I’ve been working on over the Summer with Collabora. I’ve made small UI changes that have made a meaningful difference to the end users.

What else have you been working on over the Summer?

I solved an existing bug with toggling elements in the notebook bar and also worked on the ability to toggle Dark Mode. I started the template for the Admin Console, creating a foundation for clustered diagnosis.

Why did you want to spend your Summer at Collabora?

I was told it would be valuable to get work experience in technology to help with my University application, and in the future it would look good on my CV. I originally heard about the Internship from the Computer Science department at my school – Michael Meeks came in to do a talk and I was inspired by his charisma. It made me excited to spend the Summer working on my skills through working at Collabora.

What did you learn from your time at Collabora?

The most valuable thing for me was learning how to work as part of a team. It’s hard to get this experience at GCSE and A Level as you’re only really given small personal projects.

What do you want to be working on in the future?

I don’t really know exactly what I want to work on yet! There’s so many different things you can do which is what attracted me to the industry. Having the skills is a real door opener and transferable across many industries.

Would you recommend an internship at Collabora to others interested in a career in technology?

Absolutely! It was challenging but stimulating – I’m very thankful for a great opportunity and to Pedro and Pranam for the skills they’ve taught me.

Christopher has been continuing to work on some projects for Collabora during his final year of college. We are excited to see what other UI improvements will be made over the coming months.

Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!

Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Lets hear from Skyler:

Tell me about yourself!

My name is Skyler and I’m currently studying Maths, Further Maths, Computer Science and Business Studies at college. I spent the summer holidays doing an internship at Collabora Productivity. I’m into software development and video games, especially Minecraft and Celeste. I have a huge Steam library!

When did you first become interested in technology/coding?

When I was 11, my parents got me Raspberry Pi and I became fascinated with learning how to programme. Then in Secondary school I had an awesome Computer Science teacher who let us use old laptops to create a server where we built a small internal website. Since then I’ve been doing software development as a hobby.

What’s your favourite project you’ve worked on?

Oh, there’s quite a few to choose from! I’ve made several Discord bots which are automated game bots, including one to play Cards Against Humanity which was installed on over 2000 servers. I also made a version of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe – you can access it at https://uttt.crawling.us. I particularly enjoy creating smaller things that feed into one another to create something larger.

What have you been doing over the summer?

I’ve mostly been working on JSDialog, such as ‘repair document’, ‘number format’ or ‘split table’. I think the most common (and arguably most important) one I’ve worked on is ‘insert captions’ which is ~90% done: there’s 3 dialogs that work together to make our captioning work and I’ve converted 2 of them fully and figured out but not fully fixed an issue for the third.

Why did you want to spend your Summer interning at Collabora?

I went to a talk by Michael at my school where he told us about the benefits we’d get from doing an internship. He mentioned developing scalable techniques for big projects which I thought would be interesting and useful to learn.

I would have spent all Summer doing software programming anyway so I thought instead of letting the summer slip away, I would spend it learning. Plus it looks good on a university application!

What did you learn from your time at Collabora?

The main thing I learnt was the importance of taking notes efficiently so you can see what you were thinking and see if there were any assumptions you made that were wrong. I also learned how to implement scalable techniques (as Michael was talking about) which has really helped me.

What do you want to be working on in the future?

I’ve thought of various things I’d like to work on but I really enjoy back end development, much more than front end. I enjoy DevOps, scripts and testing – it’s satisfying to test and deploy.

I’m applying for university to do a Computer Science course focused on theory and software development and hopefully I’ll be able to get involved with some more projects at Collabora around my studies.

Would you recommend an internship at Collabora to others interested in a career in technology?

Yes absolutely, I’ve encouraged a few of my friends at school to apply!

It has been great to have Skyler work with us, and to see the impact on the codebase for all our users. Making our user-interface more visually consistent helps users to have a more easy to use and seamless experience. The underlying code improvements will also help to reduce complexity, making life easy for the next contributors to Collabora Online.

Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!