Max:

During my final year at UoB, I begun to look for summer internships in industry; and found the opportunity to work to Epimorphics while browsing the Computer Science Society’s advertising board. The opportunity was for gaining experience in frontend web development, and as I’d had experience working with open data and open source projects, this seemed like a good chance to further my skills.

I began my internship by working on a demo of the Environment Agency rainfall, tide gauge and flood warning APIs which displayed data on a map. This was built using Vue.js and leaflet maps, and was a good way of getting up to speed with the front end technologies we use, as well as gaining experience working with the APIs we have built for the Environment Agency. I also used this opportunity to try out the Cesium mapping framework, allowing me to recreate the maps in 3D and VR, which, although fun to work with, didn’t perform well enough for the project.

Once the demo was finished, I started work on a dashboard using Elixir and Vue to track repository statistics and Trello cards. This was a good introduction to working with linked data, Fuseki and later on Cassandra.

I graduated from university part-way through my internship and was offered a full-time position at Epimorphics, from there I have worked with interesting backend technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Cassandra, Spark and Airflow. Working with all of these technologies led me to find that I enjoyed the operations side of software development and this is now my main focus.

Demos and some further write-up is available (here).

 

Mihajlo:

I am a Computer Science student at the University of Bristol completing a year in industry with Epimorphics between my second and final year. Initially, I came to Epimorphics during my second year where we were required to team up with a company in industry to build a software solution as part of the Software Product Engineering module. We built [‘myRivers’], an android app that provides detailed river catchment characteristics and pollution reports by utilising several APIs. I was teamed up with three colleagues; Ian, Mike and Paul, who were really approachable and always available to provide advice on any aspect of the project. We ended up winning a departmental “Best Team Project” award which wouldn’t have been possible without the input from our mentors; it was this relationship that made me want to apply for an internship with Epimorphics.

I was interested in working for a startup company where you get to work with every employee. I was also interested in learning about the semantic web since we don’t learn about it at university, and this is Epimorphics’ USP.

During my internship, I worked on two projects, spending the first month and a half re-designing and implementing new features of myRivers. In order to do this we had a couple of meeting with potential user, the Rivers Trust who provided valuable feedback on the app’s features. Going through this ‘user research’ journey was useful for my personal development as I had never been through that process before.

The second part of the internship was developing a web widget that visualises land registry data as well as provides an interface for a user to edit and run SPARQL queries over data. It was built in Vue.js and was the first front-end web application I’d built. It was rewarding to have expanded my skill base whilst also building something that can be useful to anyone interested in investing in real estate.

the 2018 internships

We’re currently recruiting for new interns for Summer 2018! If you’re a student or junior developer and interested in learning more, have a look at our careers pages or a little more detail on the summer-internships-2018 page.  You can get in touch via careers@epimorphics.com