My name is Henco Appel and I recently completed my first year of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Back in April I won the Code Off held by Snowflake Software at my university, the prize being a summer internship! I’ve just completed my first week at Snowflake and so far I’m really enjoying myself. I’ve been asked to blog about my internship this Summer and give you an insight to the Snowflake development team so I guess here goes…!

 

Being Agile

I started my week with some introductory overview sessions, during which I learned about the history of the company, about the different teams and their roles, the company’s main data exchange products (GO Loader and GO Publisher) and the Agile development process which is used by the development team. As it was the end of the development team’s Sprint this week, I was able to experience the review process during which the team demonstrate what they have done and then reflect back on the success of the week. The following day the development team have a planning session to select which tasks should be completed next. I’m impressed with how closely Snowflake stays in touch with its customers to make sure that any urgent requirements or bugs are tracked and then dealt with very quickly due to this process.

ShipIt

I was lucky to join the week of ShipIt Day. ShipIt is a day that the developers compete for the ShipIt Day cup by choosing a new feature to implement into any of the products, with only a day to deliver working code, and a vote is cast at the end to determine who has implemented the most impressive feature. The P&P (Pre and Post Sales) team also get to vote separately for the most useful new feature with the best customer benefit. My idea was for the AIXM viewer, the only product I’ve worked on, and it was the ability to be able to switch on or off the individual layers of the separate files which have been loaded. The most trouble I had was creating a tree structure with checkboxes. I managed to get my project working only half an hour before the deadline! The team were impressed with my work, but it was a tough competition and with Michael’s Web Start version of GO Publisher and Hardo’s Chrome plugin to directly load OSM data from the internet, I didn’t stand a chance. I still had lots of fun and certainly enjoyed the pizza.