First impressions of the internship at UIZ, Berlin

Berlin.

Street art, cultures from all over the world, street guitarists playing Jimi Hendrix covers, massive buildings, big parks, triple the amount of car lanes compared to Belgium, bad English of non-foreigners and the freedom for anyone to express himself. A unique and wonderful place for sure!

An impression of awesomeness was definitely the first one I had. From the small signs of artistic expression that are to be found on every other corner, to the wild variance in neighborhood culture and aesthetic, this one city feels like there’s half a country worth of content packed into the area.

Properly organized buildings and parking space. Yeah, that’s something worth noting when you’re from Belgium.

On top of that, the city seems to pay high tribute to its history. Street names reference famous composers and philosophers, churches put candles to remember the war, and the whole Berlin wall is marked throughout the city. A piece of it is still standing, yet, it’s now just a wall with some graffiti on it. But hey, cool thought.

The Berlin wall used to stand right here!

Anyway, let’s get to the point: The internship.

The first day at UIZ was… A little chaotic, to say the least.
It certainly set the mood and tone for the following days to come.

Mr. Thakur, the CEO of the company, is a man with great ambition. He’s taking the company as far as he can, and is doing as much as possible, mostly by himself.
This does result in occasional chaos, when he is at times permanently summoned by the sounds of phone calls, bleeps, and email alerts.

At first, my role, job and future projects were very unclear.
When discussing the actual activities of the company with my fellow intern colleagues, they mostly remained a mistery to all. Nobody appeared to really know what the company exactly was doing. And during the following weeks, I would understand the reasons why.

My attempt of understanding and organizing the chaotic receiving of tasks

After some time of waiting around (between 1 and 2 hours) and talking to another intern who had worked here for the past three months, Mr. Thakur gave me and the other new intern a nice welcoming speech: How we’re responsible for our tasks, how we’re our own managers, etc. The speech definitely was… Interesting.

After this, I was assigned my first task: Fix this receipt printer over WiFi.
I’ve come to understand that this thing has received numerous fixing attempts over the past 2-3 weeks, to no avail. So they pushed to task to the new intern. Understandable. Maybe the Gods’ mercy is upon us and the dices would roll well. Maybe this time the damn machine would work!

I did the usual IT research and investigation, received the advice to install a virtual machine because the driver didn’t work on Windows 10, which I did, pulled out all the tricks I could to get the drivers compatible, until I discovered that the hardware itself just didn’t have a WiFi module. Getting the machine to work was technically impossible. Well, at least they could stop trying for now. And that was the end of that day.

Receipt printer that only suppots Bluetooth

Second day, second task: “Learn prestashop”. And then he left for a while.
There didn’t seem that much to learn. Especially because I had learned it all the day before, during waiting time. When the boss came back after a few hours, I had to transfer all products of an old site to the new one. Which actually meant, clicking “export” on the first site, and “import” on the latter. Yeah, it wasn’t too impressive. Furthermore, I had to do some edits here and there to WordPress websites.
Nothing too amazing so far…

It wasn’t all bad. I mean, it’s not like a wage, but, not bad.

As time passed, I got a little worried. The minimum amount of employees required for my school to qualify for the internship was met, however, those employees were in the office in Nepal. Here, we have the CEO, Mr. Thakur, and another employee, Pratik. Who, as I discovered last week, is also still an intern (though paid) for another month or two.

After stories of the other interns and a lack of tasks that I’ve been studying for for the last 2.5 years, my worries grew. I decided to inform my school and ask for their perspective on the situation.

Some Skyping back and forth between me, the school and UIZ did appear to bring some changes. Slowly, I was (however still in extremely chaotic fashion) given some more difficult tasks.

As it turns out, hosting a few hundred of small WordPress and PrestaShop websites on shared hosting, results in ~~a few~~ lots of them being hacked.

The Google Sheets file definitely contained all the necessary passwords to work on these sites. Somewhere…

This week was a quest of finding data in the 10+ sheets without any columns or structure (just data pasted everywhere), randomly logging in to hosting sites, to hopefully find the site I’m working on, figuring out which of the three to four times copied “backup” folders the actual site was reading files from, making more backups of the current files, and trial and error restoring older backups until one worked.

This was ~~a little bit~~ completely opposed to what I had been learning for the last few years, where the focus was on quality and understanding the actual problem in order to get a solid fix for it.

The few times where I was diving into the debug mode and database itself, to figure out the actual problems, I got corrected for not working the right way.

However, it’s slowly getting better.

Me and Pratik bundled our desire for structure and destruction of chaos, and we created a clean document. I’ve set it up so that it contains structured lists with the websites, where all the information that we need is found right next to it (instead of in random sheets + somewhere in the control panel of the hosting + log in to the FTP to find the rest of the data in the config file). It has colors and column headers. It’s amazing. It’s huge. It’s going to be great. (Sorry)

That was a lot of text… Here’s a picture!

I’m proud to say that I’ve brought back 7 of the hacked websites in a week, aside to various other random tasks. I’m in contact with the people from Nepal, fixing websites, setting up administrator passwords, configuring webmail, editing databases to restore accounts, removing corrupt code out of files, going through all the advanced WordPress settings, and most importantly, bringing a bit of well needed structure in the company workflow. Regarding interns, I’m definitely the only one who has his day and the coming days completely filled.

Anyway, this has been a nice ~~wall of text~~ blog post already, more stuff is coming either way!

Thanks for reading and congratulations if you’ve made it this far!
Laurens out.

Contemplations of the #oSoc16 experience

Original post. More oSoc16 awesomeness.

Good old memories… of last week

I remember it profoundly.

Exiting the train station of Brussels North, the fresh wind wholeheartedly introducing the monster high fancy buildings.
Clean and open space led to the various entrances of the monumental glass castle towers, one of which expected me among the 23 other students.

Fear and uncertainty awaiting patiently to be dived into once again.
The #oSoc16 experience was at hand.

Fear arose when the boss started speaking, the first drops of sweat appearing on the frightened foreheads of innocent students blessed with ignorance.

Leading the flock to victory, a motivational speech was in place — Leading the flock to victory, a motivational speech from the boss was in place

pj4 — The subject of the presentation was as clear as his vision for the future

I can vividly recall the bliss I felt upon finding the source of eternal free coffee dispensing while munching the equally free coffee couques we had all received.

Indeed, on this first blessed day, the coffee couques came at an infinitely cheaper price than all the couques that would follow. Little did we know (I’m composing a requiem for Eveline as we speak)…

Instructions came, coffee was drank, t-shirts were given.
There was an awesome vibe in the air.

Excitement to deliver epic projects, a curious yet positive outlook on the following weeks, and of course, that feeling when you make a nerd joke and people actually get it.
My God, you have no idea how good that feels.

Meet the team

We’re working on a project for VIAA. Check out our faces in a professional work environment.

The guy behind the water bottle is Tjen, the shy looking lady pretending she’s unaware of me taking a picture is Eva, and the guy with only half a face is Brecht.
Rumors say he only has half faces when you take pictures of him.

Brecht is not a student for #oSoc16, he’s working for VIAA. But he’s working together with us on the project and helping us out with tons of stuff!
Him not being in the #oSoc16 VIAA team on paper, doesn’t undo his membership in the team in our hearts (aww).

And last but not least, famous in the underground nerd scene for being epic at everything and helping me to find jobs, Sander respectfully wasn’t bullied by picture spam under the ‘have to make a blogpost’ excuse. His coaching is pushing the quality of the complete package. Thanks to him, our code is clean, decent, readable and legit.

I suppose we forgot one team member though… ‘The dude in green or metal t-shirts’, author of silly blog posts, nominee for most caffeinated student in Brussels 2016, it’s none other than the infamous Laurens. Damn, it’s weird to introduce yourself.

hipster-alert_10242 — I was there by choice, really.. Noone threw me out because I was being annoying – don’t believe them

This team is awesome. Seriously.
Seriously really very awesome.

Fortune was with me when fate decided to roll its dices and not only grant me the open Summer of code experience, but generously threw me in this team as well.

Eva’s need for polished results, Tjen’s attention to the importance of user experience, Brecht’s downright illegal skills in database queries and Sander’s answers to all our exotic approach decisions, make for an extreme ninja team that’s completely ready to nail the project in anime boss fight fashion!

And I wrote some HTML and stuff.

@VIAA

This blogpost isn’t just written from anywhere, it’s written from the unofficial VIAA ~~basement~~ office in Ghent!

Today we met more people of the VIAA team involved with the project, and received some precious feedback, goals, visions, and new perspectives.

And free food.

Learning way too much

Ok, so in school you’re supposed to learn a lot. As in, I was learning more in a month than I usually do in a year.

I’m completely honest when I utter my complete surprise of the learning speed at #oSoc16. It’s absolute and utter madness, frightening almost.

Every single day my mind has been blown, expectations got exceeded, knowledge has been fed, and confusion on vague and eccentric topics has been removed (well, more like ‘significantly reduced’, we’re still talking web development here).

IMG_20160707_174106 — An overview of our project! Yeah …

I’ve grown more as a developer in these last 7 days than I have in the last year.

I’ve learned so much about people with various strengths in various aspects of what is in the end a common goal: the creation of awesome web projects.

We’re not even halfway, yet half a lifetime of experiences have been… experienced!
I’m calling it for now 🙂 Hope you had a good read!

PS: today I learned I can do the following:

(function() { 
    function fnction(fnction) { 
        fnction();
    }
    fnction(function() {
        alert('Laurens out');
    });
})();

Goa

There is alot of hype about Goa.
Many tales go around and live in the whispers of travelers.

Unfortunately, I got to experience a different reality.

This old ‘Goa’, this paradise of naked hippies raving on the beaches, peace for everyone, eternal festival, this place where one can escape from the madness of India and relax, feel home, bond with people, it seemed to me that only the story of this remains.
The story of a Goa that died.

Many things must have changed, from hordes of russian tourists coming with chartered flights that are all canceled since one year ago, to the sudden strictness of the motorbikes having a plate and the drivers having a license.

It might be just that I arrived at the wrong time, but what I found there, was the opposite of what I expected.

The hotels seemed to abuse the reputation and asked for prices too high; motorbike rental stalls were very much available, in fact they were all over the place, however the prices were so as well.

And a single foreigner I did not see. I ended up spending ~5 days in Goa, and only saw Indian tourists.
Yes, this did imply that the streets were extremely dirty. Touristy Indians throw more trash on the ground than Indians at home.
Or maybe it were the cows on the beach opening up the few trash cans that were there…

For the Indian tourists, Goa is now a place where you can walk around on the street with a beer in your hand. In many places in India this is not allowed, only drinking in private would be allowed, and in some places a total ban would be in place.
So here they can ‘go wild’ and drink a beer while walking on the street.

While I was having a coffee on the beach, a random Indian guy came and asked me for money, because the day before he was going wild and fell asleep on the beach, where a thief in the night took all his rupees and his Samsung Galaxy phone.

I was a little bit in doubt, for a multitude of reasons.
1. I’m very frustrated with all Indian people thinking I am rich. I worked for this and lived in great sobriety to save every euro I could, I’m using all my money, and might very well have given up a good old day, just to make this travel happen.
2. I don’t like giving random people money. If I give to one, it’s injustice to all the rest.
3. I don’t have money to spare, and every rupee I give I certainly will not get back. As friendly and nice as many Indian people are, they would not give me money or treat me.
4. If I give money to people asking for it, I’m supporting a begging system. It is a capitalistic society after all, which means that every bit of money one spends, goes into the support of what you are spending it on.
5. He spoke Inglish. It was extremely hard to figure out if he was actually in trouble or just spouting out some nonsense to get free money.
6. There was a friend next to him who didn’t say anything the whole time. And they both still had their backpacks.

So, dear reader, what would you have done?
I ended up giving him money for the bus, and letting him make a call to his father.
He could then take the bus to the next city where a friend of his father could borrow him some money to get home.

However, the same night, I saw him again, that friend of his father wasn’t home.
Now it was getting even more fishy. Am I just treating this guy free beers or is he even more in trouble than he was?
Anyway I took him to a restaurant for some food and gave him a bit more money. But this was enough.

His name was Raj. And he lived in Mumbai.

After a day or two I did settle down and just relaxed. Took some walks on the beach and did enjoy the sea very much.
It was a bit of a special sea, the waves were very bright and white, and they randomly flooded very close or far from the sea.

So I could enjoy the place, but in general I must admit it was a bit of a disappointment.
Though lesson iterated: Expectations can diminish or even crush our experiences.