By Marion Laanemae on Mon 09 March 2020 in Placement Blog
Find out what it's like to be part of a fast-moving, start-up company - Zing, the consultancy division of ProspectSoft, by checking out Marion's blog!
Now 7 months into my Placement year with Zing, the consultancy division of ProspectSoft, I can confidently say that I’ve learned more than I ever expected when I first started applying for placements. I’ve been working on various internal and client projects. Some of the technologies that I’ve used in Zing are .NET Core to write APIs, React and Vue for creating front-ends and using Microsoft Azure to set up resources. I feel the biggest learning curve for me was using Microsoft Azure as I haven’t worked with any cloud platform previously, so it was interesting to see how easy it is to spin up services for your software solution. I feel that I’m learning something new every day and developing a wide range of skills much faster compared to when I first started 7 months ago.
One exciting client project that I worked on was a mobile app for one of our largest clients. I consider this as my biggest accomplishment to date because the use of React-Native (cross-platform native app framework) was proposed by me in one of the meetings we had. In Zing, nobody had any experience using React-Native, so it was down to me to research it and confirm it was suitable for our project. When the project started, the mobile app was developed from scratch solely by me in 2 sprints (1 month). The app was production-ready and was shown to the end-users for some feedback. I received a lot of praise from everybody at Zing including our CEO and Business Development Manager who said: “You should feel proud of what you have accomplished in such a short time”.
One recent internal project that I worked on was a new dashboard for Zing which shows important business analytics and is displayed every day on a TV in our office. This dashboard uses various external APIs including Jira, Google and Zendesk API. As part of this internal project, I had to develop a new contact centre solution for Zing. So, when someone calls into Zing, it’s my code that takes you to the right person. It was a fun project and it was great to get more experience working with Twilio APIs. The best part was that I got to choose the ringtone for our phone system (cowbells)!
Another brilliant opportunity I was lucky to be a part of was visiting Twilio Superclass and Engage back in November, where I learned more about how to develop software solutions with Twilio APIs. Here, I was lucky enough to meet Twilio’s CEO and speak with him about React. In January, I was also really pleased to get accredited by Twilio in Twilio Platform (2 exams) and Twilio Flex (1 exam).
Overall, I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made over the last 7 months, and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work both on the client and server-side. I’m looking forward to the next 5 months to further develop my existing software development skills and am excited to go back to University to complete my degree so I can fully concentrate on becoming the best Developer I can be!
One exciting client project that I worked on was a mobile app for one of our largest clients. I consider this as my biggest accomplishment to date because the use of React-Native (cross-platform native app framework) was proposed by me in one of the meetings we had. In Zing, nobody had any experience using React-Native, so it was down to me to research it and confirm it was suitable for our project. When the project started, the mobile app was developed from scratch solely by me in 2 sprints (1 month). The app was production-ready and was shown to the end-users for some feedback. I received a lot of praise from everybody at Zing including our CEO and Business Development Manager who said: “You should feel proud of what you have accomplished in such a short time”.
One recent internal project that I worked on was a new dashboard for Zing which shows important business analytics and is displayed every day on a TV in our office. This dashboard uses various external APIs including Jira, Google and Zendesk API. As part of this internal project, I had to develop a new contact centre solution for Zing. So, when someone calls into Zing, it’s my code that takes you to the right person. It was a fun project and it was great to get more experience working with Twilio APIs. The best part was that I got to choose the ringtone for our phone system (cowbells)!
Another brilliant opportunity I was lucky to be a part of was visiting Twilio Superclass and Engage back in November, where I learned more about how to develop software solutions with Twilio APIs. Here, I was lucky enough to meet Twilio’s CEO and speak with him about React. In January, I was also really pleased to get accredited by Twilio in Twilio Platform (2 exams) and Twilio Flex (1 exam).
Overall, I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made over the last 7 months, and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work both on the client and server-side. I’m looking forward to the next 5 months to further develop my existing software development skills and am excited to go back to University to complete my degree so I can fully concentrate on becoming the best Developer I can be!