“An internship can be key in shaping your career.” This is 100% true, I just finished a 9-weeks internship at Devoteam G Cloud and this led to a full-time job as a Google Cloud Software Engineer. In this article I’ll explain you how my internship journey started, how I successfully completed my internship, and I’ll give you some top tips on how to turn your internship into a fantastic job opportunity.
Written by Willem Teughels, Intern during the 1st semester of 2021 & now full-time Google Cloud Software Engineer at Devoteam G Cloud.
Looking for a challenge
When I was looking for an internship, I was looking for a challenge. A place where I could learn a lot, in order to prepare myself for my future job.
So I came across a job ad from Devoteam G Cloud on indeed.com. When I looked the company up, I was sold. I instantly noticed what a modern/family company Devoteam G Cloud was. I decided to go for it and send in my resume.
Meeting o’clock
First I had an introduction meeting with the Recruitment Manager. This meeting was followed by a more technical meeting with Tristan, Head of Machine Learning. I had to prepare two projects, one in Go and one in Python. Here I had to give some explanations about the code and how I could adapt certain things for a real-life use case. One week later, I heard the good news: I was in for the internship!
Let’s do this!
Day 1
On the first day of my internship, I received a warm welcome by the Team. I was immediately introduced with Andrea, my mentor for the coming 9 weeks. He immediately took me into my first stand-up meeting with the whole Flycs team. I received a bunch of information about:
- The company
- The technologies we use
- The core of my assignment
- How we can approach this assignment
- …
What will I be working on?
My main objective was to create an authentication microservice together with a library to be able to communicate with this service. This was specifically needed for Flycs, a data warehouse accelerator framework on Google Cloud. I was looking forward to this because I could practice my hobby during office hours.
How amazing is that? And to make it even better, I got to write it in my favorite language, Golang.
Day 67: What have I learned?
After 9-weeks, my time as a Google Cloud Software Engineer intern is coming to an end. The skills I have gained and the knowledge I am taking away are immeasurable. Summarised below are the most important aspects of this experience:
- Learning how to use Docker properly
- Writing tests and running them through CI/CD.
- First introduction with Google Cloud
- Figuring out how to configure Casbin with different access modals like ALC, RBAC & ABAC
- Using gRPC to be able to communicate without any language barriers
- And something I value the most. A completely new way of structuring/writing my code
- Take risks & Try something new
“Willem took the internship seriously from the start. He was able to impressively deal with all the challenges he encountered while implementing the product. He was not aware of some technologies at the time (Docker, casbin, gitlab CI/CD) but he took the time to learn and build something useful for us. I will remember 3 very positive things about Willem: he is a fast learner, problem solver and a good programmer. We were lucky to have him in our team. Thanks for your hard and excellent work.”
– Andrea Bombino, Google Cloud Data Engineer at Devoteam G Cloud
Next step on my journey?
I was about to graduate & looking for my first job. I started to apply for jobs during my internship and this paid off as I received a job offer from another company. I immediately went to my mentor Andrea and told him what was going on. He informed the HR department about it. A day later I had a meeting with Niels, our CTO to talk about which direction I wanted to go. Later that day I received an offer that I signed immediately.
Conclusion
I am very glad that I applied for this internship ad because I got the best internship I could dream of. I learned so much, had a lot of fun, and got to know awesome and smart new people. And I am very happy that I can continue to work here. From now on I can call myself a proud G Clouder!
What I love about our company is that we have different gatherings on different topics every month. We all (virtually) sit in a meeting and talk about new things that people have find out. Or something they want to tell. This way you get to know your colleagues better, and you gain a lot of extra knowledge that is always useful.
PS: If I haven’t convinced you yet, you get cool Googly goodies when you start & nice sushis.If you want to be a part of this fantastic team, be sure to check out the job ads or apply spontaneously! Because it’s awesome to work here, believe me. Feel free to contact me if you have any doubts or questions.
