1. Where did you find out about the company?

"I found out about the company through a university friend of mine, that had worked here for a year. He told me there was an opening if I was interested, to which he sent me the website address with the details of the company and I learnt more."

2. What did you do during the internship?

"The internship was very diverse.

In the beginning we tested our SQL knowledge with challenging and thought provoking queries. We then proceeded to doing a Linux course, a basic requirement as a technical consultant, we require the knowledge to be able to navigate through servers which do not have a User Interface.

We then got ourselves acquainted as much as we could with two Finastra based products, FusionFabricConnect (an ETL tool) and FusionRisk ARC (a calculation and reporting tool).

Thereafter we started our involvement with a Enfint based product.

This is where we started learning about virtualization through dockerised containers. Using Docker containers to host Jenkins, FusionFabricConnect, mongodb and FusionRisk ARC, and using Jenkins for CI/CD deployment.

This is where I learned how to use REST API's to integrate FFDC (Fusion Fabric Dot Cloud, a cloud distribution platform for Finastra apps, or allowed 3rd party apps) and FusionFabricConnect. This incorporated usage of maven Spring boot applications as well, and later learning about automation using Azure cloud features for Datasets.

We then moved along to using Graalvm (A JVM which always for usage of other programming languages inside of java directly) to merge java and python code together, specifically to edit and read Jupyter files for Jupyter notebook. This required customized docker files which allowed for Jupyter and the latest Graalvm to run in unison to achieve our goals.

And finally, this incorporated the learning of Budibase and to see if it was a viable solution for what was required.

Amongst this, we then started our real world projects, the only real way to learn, to which each of us were assigned to a different client, and did presentations, produced specifications documents, installed the products and maintained it for the team and for the client, customizing where required, etc."

3. What did you like the most about your internship?

" Working on Enfint based finance application was probably the most challenging part of my internship, I enjoyed it so much because everyday we were testing boundaries and learning how to achieve things that weren't already popularly achieved."

4. What useful knowledge and skills did you acquire during the internship?

"Creating microservices, and using Jenkins for CI/CD were genuinely new skills for me. I was not well versed in docker, let alone, DIND (docker inside of docker) either, and now I use docker for so many of my own local examples e.g. creating a SQLServer connection with a docker container and then using that for my local Fusion Fabric Connect and Fusion Risk for testing."

5. What are you doing at the company now? What are your next goals?

"I'm currently a junior technical consultant, about to finish my first client project, and assisting in another one. My goals are to gain enough soft skills currently, to which I didn't really understand I lacked, to help become a well rounded consultant. I also want to grow my skills as a developer, to one day become a Technical Lead/Architect myself one day."