Almost every week of the minor webdevelopment at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences we had the possibility to visit a talk from people in our workfield. And at the end of the minor we started visiting companies to gather information about the companies, this was also a great way to find an internship.
Part of the weekly nerds were to write 3 articles, the articles can be found at the links below:
- Why typescript?
- Building a scheduled news crawler with Puppeteer
- Building an interface for our Puppeteer news crawler
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Dept Amsterdam
Dept was a very big agency, which was quite overwhelming. They co-operated with many other offices all over the world. The presentation at this company was mostly about showing all the cool projects the made and what kind of customers they are working with. I have to admit that all the employees benefits and trips were very great, to fly over every 'Depter' must take quite some organisation. -
Elastique
Elastique was quite a trip to hilversum, despite the long ride it was a great company. However the first impression I got was that the are very backend focussed, as during the introduction to the workstations most of the time it was specifik for native Android or IOS development. It seemed like it lacked some Front-end developers, but this could be my misjudgement. However, I came there with a look if it would be a place where I would want to do my internship, but this wasn't the case. -
Valtech Amsterdam
Valtech had probably the most fun presentation, at first we got the sales pitch as we almost get at every company. The showcases were great as always, but the guy giving the presentation wasn't that excited to inform us about the company, as he skipped over a lot of information. But after that pitch, we got a introduction to web bluetooth, which seems like great fun to play with and should be a great addition for the minor. Overal fun projects, but not really the place I would see myself doing my internship. -
Mirabeau Amsterdam
Mirabeau was the first company we visited, the only downside was that we were their second visitors and they did not really had anything to show us. So we just talked about some front-end subjects at some hallway above their office. Their personal projects were fun to look at and the front-ender that was talking to us also flies over to customers in other countries, which got my interest. As I would like to do something like that in the far future too. -
Q42 Amsterdam
Q42 was the company I had the best click with, the talk was right and I found it much fun to talk with the developers that gave the talk. It also is very interesting that at Q42, developers can learn how to do project management right, and so most project managers have a developer background. And for me this is a big factor, as I experienced some project managers that didn't know what development was about. This will lead to problems in the long run. After the conversation I did send them my portfolio and got a solliciation meeting the next week. And I got accepted for my internship! -
Matise
Matise is, compared to most of the other companies, a small company. Situated next to Artis which is quite easy to access in Amsterdam. They talked about how they used to have many Project managers and moved towards a different company architecture, in which people can code and still manage their projects. This results in people being more often on the same page, as eveyone has experience with developing. It was great hearing about that they build small scale prototypes to show the customer what they need is not actually what they want. Great way of giving your client the best value of his money if you ask me. -
ICATT interactive media
Icatt was located in the centre of Amsterdam and had their office in a building that looked like an Airbnb building. Nothing wrong with that but it didn't gave a very fun and developer friendly enviroment feeling as we stepped in. The talk was okay, but they were also looking for a way to gain our interest and were very interested in how other people did their talks. The presention of yourself within a minute was a fun experience however. -
Lifely
At Lifely we had a very quite welcome, as not really anyone did greet us the first five minutes. But the talk we got about their workflow was interesting and they really got us into working with Typescript. We got some great examples about how easy it is to implement and how useful it is and will be in the longterm.
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Looking back at the weekly nerd talks, this was probably not my favourite. The excercises about drawing different shapes were useful, but in my own experience sketchnotes only work for me if the day after I decrypt my drawings and use them or convert them to text. In the long run I am better off with just plain text that explains what something means. Drawing next to listening is indeed great to create a great focus on the talk, but it doesn't really suit me if I look back at all my years at CMD.
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Stephen Hay's talk was very interesting because he changed my pre-assumptions. I thought it was going to be just a rant about Airbnb and other big companies. But he was actually standing still by bad practices being spread over the web due to the fact big companies use them. A sentence that stuck with me was "Focus on the problems, not solutions that other people came up with". And this is something that has actually a big meaning in the world wide web. As people will blindly follow other peoples solution "because he, or this big company used it". And this is wrong if you look further at the problem. Those solution could just be a temporary something that is there till they come up with better alternatives. "You don't learn from blindly follow conventions".
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Cyd and Dennis gave their talk about the life after the minor and showed us how they work with NuxtJS, which is a server-side rendered version of Vue. Next to Vue they talked about Angular and wordpress for a bit. They started live coding at the end to showcase us how a project would look like if you work with a framework like NuxtJS
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Maike had a great talk about DUO, a big player in the Netherlands and widely known by students. So it was great to see someone that works at a website that we are dependant on. Her statement was that the website should be about who is using it, and not what aesthetics look better. So are students using it for the funding of their study and refugees are using it for integration. Maike is looking/trying to create a way that the communication between citizen and government is pleasurable and that there is a way to communicate with everyone. The example with the rope about how close people would like to be with DUO was very interesting, as it displayed what user groups would like to get more or less in touch with DUO. Overall it changed my view on it and how much work they do behind the scenes to overcome rules and still trying to be there for everyone.
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The talk of Ischa was particularly useful as he shared loads of tools that he used during his process of creating an accessible website for more that 1 million customers. The information and the use of the tools were things I later used during the subject 'Browser technologies', so thanks for that :-). Beside the useful tools it was the man with very bad sighting that stole the show. He showed us how he had to go through every website and gave us live feedback about things that were difficult to handle for him, as he moved through different sites. I was actually a bit shocked about how inaccessible some big websites are, that are needed to get things like certificates or information about important subjects.
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Didn't make it there due to the fact I was Ill
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Daan gave a very insightful talk about how to deal with customers that don't share your vision, even if you are probably right and are advising them. It was really great to see Daan give insight about his passion and how he handles things. It took some courage of him to go into the wishes of his employer, especially as he was busy with the last steps of his bachelor degree. However it showed his personality and his product was fantastic to see.