Asidua

Emma

After a whirlwind of a first year, I have just completed Stage One of my MEng Computer Science Pathway, and I have spent the last 10 weeks of summer working at Asidua as a Placement Engineer.

Before attending university, ICT had always been my favourite subject at school – I especially enjoyed the programming side of my A-Level coursework. When researching courses to study during my Sixth Form years, a degree in computing offered me the best graduate opportunities and course outline, as it is an extremely diverse, dynamic and developing sector of business. I thoroughly enjoyed my first year at Queen’s, and I am extremely pleased that I passed my exams with the results that I achieved.

I feel that by attaining the Asidua Scholarship, I am one step ahead of many others that are also on my degree pathway, and that the experience that I will gain working at Asidua will be of great benefit once I graduate university. After hearing about the Scholarship during a Queen’s Open Day in 2009, I was keen to apply once I joined Queen’s in 2010. I was attracted to Asidua when researching about their software engineering side of business, as this is the area of computing that I am most interested in - I enjoy the logical thinking involved in solving problems. Asidua have given me the best foot forward in my career, and I am excited to see what the future holds.

If you want to learn more about my experiences in Asidua, please read my regular blog updates below…

1st August 2011
I have decided to stay on placement for two extra weeks – this was no trouble as Asidua are keen to keep us on! I have certainly learnt a lot in my last 2 months here. It is such a change of pace from learning in university, and my job gives me a lot of independence. It is great experience to learn how an office and its people function, especially before I go into my third year placement. This week I will continue to develop my C# skills, and also help Vicky [other Scholar] with her side of our collaboration. She has been using Silverlight and SharePoint to call my service [see Week 8], and I will be helping her to create and test this application. I have had a great time working for Asidua, and it has set me up nicely for my second year in university, keeping my brain refreshed on all the skills we learnt in our first year.


25th July 2011
Last week I was able to develop a ‘service’ using C#/Visual studio that takes in a person’s details and runs a test on them to see if their data meets a certain criteria. In combination with some of the other Scholarship students, they have begun to collaborate with me in order to call my service from Silverlight and CRM. Today I was able to successfully deploy it to the cloud. This week I will continue to develop my skills in C# - it’s remarkably similar to Java, so the transition between the two languages hasn’t been overly hard! This has made making programs much easier.


18th July 2011
In the past week I have created a ‘mini’ application and successfully deployed it to the cloud. It is an ‘Online Guestbook’, where people can upload pictures along with their name and a caption. These pictures will then turn into thumbnails when the page is refreshed. Albeit small in comparison to a project, this has proven that we can indeed deploy applications using C#/Visual Studio to the cloud. I have developed my C# programming skills – I have built on what I know already about programming through Java in my first year at university!

11th July 2011
In the coming week, I will be moving away from research, and begin developing my skills on C#, which I will be using in collaboration with Visual Studio to develop an application and which I will use to test and deploy to the cloud (Azure). This will greatly benefit my team as while they are busy with the development of CCP/CRM, I can test the capabilities of the little known ‘Cloud Computing’ research area and see how much we can deploy to the cloud in relation to the project.

4th July 2011
During last week I did not only research Microsoft Azure, but Office 265, BizTalk and SharePoint, to get a good feel for how they are intricate tools for the development of our team project. These are programs which are not covered in Stage One at university and so it was great to learn about them and how they work together to make one powerful application. This will keep me one step ahead of others on my pathway when I join Stage Two. This week I will continue to put my research into hard copies to distribute throughout the team.

27th June 2011
In the previous week I was able to complete my research on Cloud Computing, and I will spend this week putting it into a hard copy. I will also expand my research to Windows Azure, as I have been told that this is what I will be using to develop my cloud research in the coming weeks. Also, during the last week our Fifa 2011 Team Tournament has started – unfortunately I didn’t win my first match!

20th June 2011
Last week I finished the assigned ASP.NET tutorials. This week I will be researching Cloud Computing and Development, for the purpose of beginning and aiding Asidua research on how to integrate and deploy the current CRM/CCP applications to the ‘Cloud’. This research will entail learning about what is cloud computing, its characteristics and architecture, different types of cloud architecture and benefits and issues with the cloud.

13th June 2011
I have established a routine with work, and I have a few more introductory meetings to attend! Last week was all about settling in. I got to know more team members throughout the week, and it was a real experience learning how an office works. The environment is clean and friendly, and is heavily geared towards recycling and keeping the office green! I began practising my skills on ASP.NET by running through tutorials that my line manager assigned to me for the remainder of the week, developing and building upon my programming experience from what I learnt in university. I was briefed on the team project, which is the development of the CRM/CCP system that is deployed in local councils.

6th June 2011
My first day! My exams finished two weeks ago, and after one weeks summer break I have jumped straight into work. I wanted to start the placement as soon as possible as I have holiday plans later in the summer. Today has been filled with lots of introductory meetings, and it’s a good thing that during the Scholarship Awards Ceremony in January 2011 I got to know the other scholar students – now I know a few friendly faces! I got introduced to my team and they have told me that I will be briefed on what I will be doing throughout this week. I got to know my workplace, with my manager showing me where everything was – I think I need a map! Vicky [another scholar and already friend from university!] sits not too far away from me, so her moral support makes today much easier.