As a part of my thick sandwich course, I took on a year-long internship related to my course. The company that I spent my time in and learned many things from was SN Systems, a child company of Sony Playstation, which works on tools for game developers that make games on Playstation platforms.
During this placement, I worked in multiple teams, which focused on different sides of software production, which mainly were:
Razor team
The Razor team works on a program called Razor, which is used to analyze and profile the game running on a Playstation console.
When I was part of this team I contributed a bit to the main product by fixing some bugs and adding some tiny features using C++.
I also developed a Visual Studio extension for the team in order to solve some inconveniences that the team was facing, like project switching, executable argument modifications, environment variable modifications. This was done using C# and I was happy that I had prior experience with it.
In the end, I also modified an application that was used for testing by adding UI with ImGui. The things I learned in my course really did help me in this task.
I took a lot from working in this team, mainly – navigation and working in a massive codebase.
DevOps team
Apart from using MS Azure for my coursework once, I had no prior DevOps experience prior to joining this team. That is exactly why it was so exciting to do something I have never touched before.
I worked primarily with PowerShell scripting languages, by creating various automation scripts, which includes software version checking, package download, interacting with Team City CI software and system state test automation.
During this, I also worked a bit with YAML, for system setup automation.
Even though I am unsure about pursuing a career in DevOps, I still really enjoyed spending some time in this team and learning about a side of software development that I was absolutely unaware of before.
QA Team
The QA team was the last team I was a part of, while in the industrial placement. Here, people were responsible, for writing test automation in C#, running the said tests and then analyzing their results, manually performing tests, reporting, confirming and then closing bugs in the issue and feature tracking system (Bugzilla and Jira).
During my time within this team, I did all of the aforementioned things, which was a great way to understand and get familiar with the software that was being produced by the company. I also got a lot more opportunities to interact and learn about Team City, Jira and Bugzilla.
Test automation for GUI applications was definitely an interesting experience and I am glad I could be a part of it.
Martynas Antipenkovas 