Hello,
I’m Michal, currently studying Maths and CS in Oxford. I spent last summer doing an internship at Softwire. I applied here because of easy online application system, unlike multi-step many-pages ones I saw elsewhere. The interview process was quite fun, most of it involved solving puzzles, with some coding elements. Everyone was friendly and I even got a free lunch.
Last summer I worked on an app for spending addicts that monitors their spending and notifies relevant people when needed. We started with 2 weeks of training so I didn’t have a feeling of being thrown into deep water. Over time we got better at many things, solved many problems, fixed many bugs, and rewrote almost all of our code(twice).
We worked in 2 week long sprints, after which we reassessed our priorities and continued. That meant no huge deadlocks, and quite a broad and diverse range of issues for everyone. The part I enjoyed most was working on new features, like smarter chatbot with scripted behaviours or transparent monitoring. They both took around a week to write, and were fun for almost all of that. One task that I didn’t like was internationalization. It was boring to do and very hard enable in tests.
Work environment was great: cheap lunches in canteen, free snacks, soft drinks, tea, coffee, gym, morale events including pub trips. Add to that table sports in chill-out area, weekly cake and elastic work hours and I don’t think I was ever stressed out.
I intend to finish my degree, which won’t take long seeing as I’m starting my 4th year now. After that I’m going to look for a job in software development. I wasn’t sure if I would like it before this summer, but the experience at Softwire convinced me that it can be fun and fulfilling.
