What “Great Place To Work” means
I’m writing this article to share my internship experience at 99x. According to the curriculum, Sabra CIS undergraduates have to complete their internship in 3rd year 2nd semester. I had been interviewed by 99x and selected as a Trainee Software Engineer to complete my industrial training program.
99x specializes in delivering high-quality Software Product Engineering and Consultancy services to Independent Software Vendors in the global marketplace. The biggest strength that 99x has as a company is great management. At the same time, 99x is blessed with skillful and well-talented employees who always be the greatest power and support which stand behind the Management.
99x has a well-organized internship program called “Internship 4.0” that focuses on evaluating and ensuring the technical and social skills, exceed industry expectations in the role of an intern. 99x Uni-relations team handles all the interns and related work. For any clarification regarding the project work, I could reach to my project supervisor as well as any other project team member. Also, another mentor was assigned to me for the evaluation process and I could discuss any other thing with him.
I was assigned to Winning Product Office (WPO) project, which is an initial step of moving 99x into high-value services through Product Engineering Consultancy. 99x has started to put in place a consultancy framework called “Winning Software Products”. Based on this Market Winning Software Product offering model, WPO was initiated with a set of best practices, knowledge, and tools to make someone’s product idea a Winning Product. Winning Product combines the experiences of many learnings to form a potential best practice. Also, I was working on two more projects called Dotitude Dashboard and DevGrade React template which allowed me to gain more knowledge, skills and experience.
If I summarize the skills and knowledge I gained from the internship,
Cloud technologies — Got hands-on experience in Amazon Web Services. Used many services including, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, etc. Participated in several tech sessions regarding Cloud Computing such as “Azure Well-Architected Framework” sessions series. Also, requested from 99x and followed “AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate 2020” Udemy course.
Serverless — Worked with Serverless framework in WPO project. Also, had several KT sessions with my supervisor Mr. Ashan Fernando who is an expert in AWS, Cloud Computing and Serverless.
Front-end technologies — Worked with Angular and Gatsby frameworks in the projects. Also, had tech sessions regarding React JS and React Native.
Back-end technologies — Worked with Node JS in WPO project.
Software architecture — Learned many things regarding design patterns and software architectures from the project supervisor. He did several KT sessions regarding this. Also, practically used in the project.
Process Management System and GDPR — The company encouraged us to complete the model “Process Management System” and “GDPR” (General Data Protection Regulation) on the Maturify learn portal.
Communication skills — Had a session called “Toastinterns SpeechCraft” fortnightly which gave us a good opportunity to improve our English knowledge and communication skills as well as presentation skills.
Personal skills — Working in a project team helps to improve personal skills such as teamwork, leadership. This industrial training helped me to improve my adaptability, problem-solving abilities. Also, I could participate in organizing many programs and I could do some technical sessions within this period.
The internship program helped me gain thorough knowledge and experience about the industry, also helped to improve my skill set. I had the opportunity to join in many different initiatives and participate in several other events which helped me to improve my soft skills and meet new people. The internship program allowed me to apply what I have learned for three years at the university. It enhanced my abilities and prepared me for the industry.
I’m thankful to the Department of Computing and Information Systems, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka, for preparing me to go to the industry and I am thankful to 99x for giving me this opportunity to get the working experience in a professional environment. During this 6 months, I realized the meaning of “Great Place to Work”. It had been a great privilege to complete my internship successfully in 99x.
