Hi, I’m Matt — Abletech’s Summer of Tech intern. I’m currently three years through my Software Engineering degree at Victoria University of Wellington. I’ve been at Abletech for just over a month now so I thought I would share what it’s like working for Abletech and what I’ve learned so far.
Working at Abletech
Working at Abletech is awesome. The team is really friendly and I’ve worked on a wide range of projects. From the moment I arrived for my first day, I was made to feel right at home and not at all like an intern. Carl gave me a tour of our office, I met the Abletech and Sharesight teams and, most importantly, learned how to operate the coffee machine! Everyone is incredibly skilled and talented and always available to help out when I’m stuck on a problem. It has also been a supportive learning environment where I’ve felt valued.
What I’ve been working on
During the first week, with the help of my mentor Alex, I developed a Coffee Club Application. The Abletechers, like most people in IT, are big coffee drinkers. They wanted to keep track of the various roasts that were being used in our kitchen. With the app, users can upvote (or downvote) roasts of coffee via Slack. Our MD, Carl, could then keep track of the successful (and not so successful) roasts of coffee and we could make more informed decisions when ordering new batches. Although I had some experience with Ruby on Rails before this, developing this application taught me the ‘Ruby’ way of doing things. After this, I started working on proper client projects. This was awesome because I was actually helping with projects that would be used externally by companies and people in the real world.
What I’ve learned
I’ve learned so much from my first month at Abletech. A major learning curve has been around the use of Docker. Docker allows services to run in an isolated environment avoiding the use of a VM. I’ve also learned a lot about Capybara and integration testing — something that I struggled to get right at uni! I’ve learned a lot about production environments too. This has been through the use of Travis CI and Concourse for continuous integration and build tests.
The culture
Being part of the Abletech team for the last month has been an amazing experience. I was able to help with the big move to our new office in Ghuznee Street and even got to tour the Great War exhibition at the National War Memorial as part of our Christmas function. I also now know how to make focaccia bread (thanks Cam!). On top of this, there have been numerous staff lunches, fish and chip dinners and loads of home baking.
Learning how to make focaccia with Cam, Marcus and Oliver
Summer of Tech
The whole internship was organised through Summer of Tech. I’ve been involved with Summer of Tech since the start of the year attending bootcamps, hackfests and workshops.
The first time I met the Abletechers was at the Meet and Greet event at Westpac Stadium. I was then invited to take part in speed interviews with Carl, Oliver and Kate where I had 10 minutes to try and impress them. From there, I was offered a summer internship!
The team at Summer of Tech have been immensely helpful, ensuring my CV was appropriate and my soft skills could land me a job. I’d like to thank the Summer of Tech team for organising all these events and helping me secure this dream internship!
To sum up, my first month has been great. I’ve enjoyed the people, the learning and the Abletech culture. I’m looking forward to my next two months and more of the same.
Read more about how to land an internship at Abletech.
