Ericsson: January 2015 – August 2015
For a period of 8 months (6 months scheduled, extended by 2), I worked as a co-op student with Ericsson, after which I was earmarked as a high-performing intern. I was placed in their Research and Development site in Athlone, Ireland.
I was placed on what was then known as the Continuous Integration Infrastructure team (Or CI Infra). We managed what was known as the “left hand side” the continuous integration testing loops. This position included providing test environments, repository and dependency management, and support for 100+ teams both on-site and across the world. As a result, I became familiar with technologies such as:
- Linux
- Jenkins
- Maven
- Gerrit & Git
- Nexus
- Jira
CI Infra worked using scrum-ban methodology, a mixture between Scrum and Kanban ways-of-working. While most of our team was on-site in Athlone, we also had team members in other locations such as Poland, San Jose, India, and Genoa. The on-site team engaged in the agile ceremonies, with stand-up meetings every morning and work taken from the prioritized Jira board.
After a couple of months, I was given a project to develop a full-stack application to streamline the process for developers wishing to enter the CI testing loop. It also included an administration application for Configuration Managers to use for processing the requests, and a back-end database used to hold information on all new projects. During this project, I gained experience with the following technologies:
- JavaScript
- HTML
- LESS/CSS
- PHP
- UISDK (Ericsson in-house JavaScript SDK)
- MySQL
In the last month of my placement, I had the chance to work with Vagrant and VirtualBox, helping to build a ready-to-go development environment for new developers to the company. The IDE was built on Ericsson’s own flavor of Linux, and included pre-configured software such as Git Bash, Maven, Eclipse, and more. I worked closely with Eclipse configuration and plugin management, and was charged with getting the IDE working on Windows machines.
I found this experience in Ericsson invaluable, as I had limited exposure to structured teamwork beforehand. I enjoyed working with my team, both local and off-site. In addition, I got a taste of working in a large-scale, agile development site, and encountered many new technologies which I may not have otherwise used.
References from my manager is available on request.
Richard Flanagan 