Intern - Software Developer - Summer 2008

I did an internship at Creme Software during the summer of 2008. When I started, I was told about all of the company's ongoing and future projects and was given a choice which ones I would like to be involved with. Everyone was very friendly, and I learned a lot from the other people on the team.

We started each day with a meeting of the team, where each of us went through what we had done the previous day and what we were going to do that day. This helped me feel like I was very much involved and knew what was going on, as well as helping me bring up any problems or issues I had.

The project I worked on mostly was designing the front-end for Creme 3.0, the latest version of Creme's risk exposure web application. I came into the job with limited experience of web programming and no formal training, but I was eased into it gradually, always offered help, and learned a lot along the way. The front-end of Creme 3.0 is written in JavaScript on the client side and PHP on the server side, but I learned a lot more than simply how to program in either language. Working in a professional environment on a fully-functional application was a great learning experience. It was an eye-opener to see all the different pieces required to keep such a large-scale application running.

While I was at Creme, 'Innovation Time' was introduced, which allowed us to spend 10% of our time on a project of our own choosing, as long as it was broadly in line with the company's goals. For my own project, I suggested looking into alternative web development platforms that might be useful for future projects. I was asked to make a demonstration of the Yahoo User Interface platform, which was very enjoyable.

Overall, I enjoyed my time at Creme immensely, and learned a lot. I am going on to study High-Performance Computing and hope to end up in the same line of work, and possibly at the same company!