YouView Interns Blog - the Life of a Web Intern

Charlie Anderson is currently working in the Service Management team on a technology summer internship. He is working alongside 9 other summer interns who are working in various teams across the business. He is about to start his final year studying Computer Science at The University of Bristol.

After spending last summer at the Edinburgh fringe, I knew this summer I had to knuckle down and get a real job. YouView really appealed to me as a small yet ambitious organisation. I hoped that I would be able to make a significant contribution during the internship, and that has definitely turned out to be true.

My role involves helping to build and maintain YouView's website. Ive been working on a series of smaller fixes and improvements to the main website, youview.com (some of which will be live very soon!), as well as prototyping some new and exciting features for both the website and the YouView set-top box.

Ive really enjoyed working with modern technologies on bigger projects. Compared to the websites Ive built before, YouViews site has thousands of hits a day, which offers a great learning experience. Before this internship, I hadn't had to consider issues of scale, so I have learnt the importance of making sure what you're developing runs quickly and takes advantage of caching.

For me, a typical day normally starts before 9am. I sit next to my manager, Leyla, who's in charge of the website and we chat several times a day about the work that I'm doing, making it really easy to ask questions and ensure I'm on track. Although we work very closely, I have the freedom to implement changes as I see fit, such as which libraries to use or the architecture of particular modules. It has really impressed me that YouView is happy to trust interns to this extent and it definitely makes us feel valued.

I've learnt a great deal over the past few weeks. My HTML, CSS and Python skills have all developed and I've practiced integration with social media sites. Additionally, working with YouView's backend systems has been really interesting. It has been a real eye opener to see how big systems work when most of my experience so far has been with fairly self-contained university projects.

However, the most significant experience I have gained from the internship has been learning how to develop software in a business setting. It is one thing to be able to write a program, but quite another to develop a solution that works well with the whole business, is documented in a useful fashion and doesn't impact on any of the existing software. It's difficult to find experience working with established software projects, and I think this is a really important skill to learn.

Overall, I've had a fantastic experience at YouView. I've been able to put lots of knowledge from university into practice. For example, with software design I've had to ensure that what I write is logical and can be maintained, which is a challenge when working with an established codebase.

I'd definitely recommend YouView to anyone looking for interesting work and a fun atmosphere.

This blog was written exclusively for youview.com by Charlie Anderson who is on a Technology Internship at YouView. For opportunities and vacancies at YouView, take a look at our recruitment website: www.youview.com/jobs

LINK:	http://www.youview.com/news/2014/08/26/youview-interns-blog-the-life-o...
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