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Instaclustr Experience – Internship Blog: Senith De Silva

My name is Senith De Silva. I’m a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Canberra. On September 2018, I started my internship at Instaclustr and it’s been an amazing opportunity to be part of the team.

At the beginning,  I was given a set of clearly defined plan for the duration of 13 weeks by my supervisor, Paul Aubrey. During these 13 weeks, I have gained a lot of knowledge and exposure to open source technologies, which I used to contribute to the team. Some of these technologies are Apache Cassandra, TestNG & REST-Assured testing frameworks, and Jenkins. One of the major tasks I worked on was automating Monitoring API Metric Tests. The task includes creating a new REST API endpoints, and a new module to handle all the testing automation.

A typical day at Instaclustr consists of working on tasks from 9 to 5. I also start off my morning with a good cup of coffee that I make using their in-house coffee machine, which is very convenient to have after a hard day of work. Tasks can include researching, meetings, coding, and writing documents. Each day we have a daily stand-up meeting with the team,  where we share about what we did on the previous day and what we will do on the current day. Attending these meetings gave me the opportunity to further develop my communication skill. Most importantly, I had the opportunity to openly talk within the group.

The best things about my internship was the nature of the work and the team I was working with. At Instaclustr, everyone is passionate about what they do and motivated to get work done. I have previously worked with co-workers who were not extremely engaged. that’s not the story at Instaclustr, All the team members are very experienced Software Engineers and they all have that hunger to keep pushing forward. As a result, I was able to put all my effort and work passionately for the duration of my internship.

The biggest challenge for me was to get myself adapted to the DevOps work environment. I had to understand how their whole development lifecycle works because there are procedures to follow to get work done. This was a big learning curve for me because I understood how the Software Development Life Cycle works in theory, however it was good to see a real-world environment and how the DevOps team apply the principles . Of course, the process can change from organization to organization.

Ever since I started my journey in this field, I always wanted to use my skills and knowledge I gained from the university and solve a real-world problem in the workplace.Now, I can say that I have got the privilege to experience what it takes to solve real-world problems as a true Software Engineer, and my journey is just getting started. I am so thankful for the opportunity I got to be part of an amazing company and working with amazing people. Cheers to the best internship ever!