YouView Interns Blog - Reflections on a Technology Internship

Alex Haak has just completed an eight week placement as a Software Development Intern at YouView. He recently returned from a year abroad in Hong Kong and is about to start his final year studying Computer Science at the University of Warwick.

What do you get when you cross a young tech nerd, two months of summer and an awesome company?

Well reflecting on my last two months, I have come to a conclusion and can safely say you get an amazing experience. Aside from all the great people, exposure to the industry and a good amount of table football, the one thing that will leave a lasting impression is my development technically. Over my two months working at YouView I had a project of my own, creating something from scratch that I could showcase at the end of my placement. But more on that later.

I worked as part of the Content Development and Innovation team, helping content providers to deliver their content on the YouView platform. My task was to develop a HTML5 reference player, demonstrating the capabilities and potential of the platform. As well as hacking together an app that explored the key features and principles, it was important to document and evaluate the process and results.

The application was built from the ground up starting with analysis and selection of a number of appropriate frameworks. I thoroughly enjoyed the autonomy I had over the project with freedom to make architectural choices. Things were fast-paced with a 1 week sprint cycle and I got going quickly with working prototypes very early in the internship.

This rapid agile development reflected the fast moving and dynamic atmosphere that makes YouView the awesome company it is. From the initial working prototypes I slowly started to scale up the application, exploring interesting concepts and features that could be included in it. The scope of my brief was somewhat relaxed meaning I could run with the project and really surprise myself (and hopefully the team). Angular proved a valuable framework allowing me to prototype quickly whilst providing the scaffolding for a more extensible and modularised application.

I had amazing fun working on the project but, as I thought at the time, it can't have been that interesting to anyone outside of my team? Well, I was wrong. Two days before my YouView departure, due to interest from outside the team, I had the (slightly terrifying) privilege of demonstrating my work to the entire company, which received lots of interest (and even some praise!). YouView employees are not your regular employees; they are some of the top brains in the industry and made the experience even more special.

I was privileged to enjoy working with cutting edge technology in company with a passion for innovation. The YouView platform is always changing and evolving, not only to provide an amazing user experience but also to pushing boundaries of the technology and this really shaped my outlook on development.

Going into the internship, whilst I had learnt a lot at Uni, I had very little real experience. I'm a self-professed advocate of learning by doing, and an internship is the perfect environment to do exactly that. Excelling in the tech world is all about making awesome stuff and there is no better way to prepare yourself for that than by getting your hands dirty. Am I more prepared for my future career and studies? Absolutely.

This blog was written exclusively for YouView.com by Alex Haak who recently completed an internship in the Content Development and Innovation team at YouView. To find out more about opportunities at YouView, please visit our recruitment side http://www.youview.com/jobs/

LINK:	http://www.youview.com/news/2014/08/11/youview-interns-blog-reflection...
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