1. Traineeship introduction

Welcome to our internal eduction plan for your traineeship.

This section is about structuring your next few weeks working with us. The rationale why we’re doing this is this:

• You can be responsible from your first day on

• You know exactly what you’ve to do

• You don’t depend on your coach giving you tasks all the time

• You learn what it means to work in IT by solving issues autodidactic

Of course you’re one smart cookie, but whenever you need any help, your personal coach is there for you.

Note

We’re doing this for the first time, so you’re our guinea pig. If you think something’s wrong or if you’ve a hard time, please let us know.

Your next 4 years

Your next 4 years with us will introduce you to…

• … our internal structures & processes

• … your rights and duties in our company

• … project management and how to work in an agile environment

• … IT basics, such as protocols, operating systems, networking, etc.

• … development and how to build & maintain (web) applications

• … engineering and how to setup & maintain IT environments

• … code management and how to work with SCM workflows

• … a lot of deep dive in specific areas

We’re usually working with Python and Django, thus most things you’ll develop will happen in those technologies.

Development paradigm

Here are some important insights into development:

Everybody can start developing, but there are huge differences between an excellent, a mediocre & a bad developer.

Code quality and thus the quality of a product, often depends on the developer and his experience. However, because somebody’s developing applications for X years, doesn’t necessary make her/him an experienced expert. What’s much more important are the basics. Most of the excellent developers & system engineers know the basics, rather than all the new fancy tech crap.

There are many frameworks which help you getting shit done much faster without knowing any of the basics. This might work for simple projects, but without having knowledge in the basics, you’ll lack a lot of knowledge which is important to get things right. Of course you’re much faster in development if you ignore the basics and dig right into it, but in this case future maintenance becomes a disaster, because you don’t know what went wrong.

With us, you’ll learn all the basics and we force you to use & learn things other developers won’t learn. You’ll use command line tools, even if there are fancy GUI’s out there. It is crucial that you understand all those basics! Most of the things you use & see in IT are standards which origin in the 90s.

Note

For example, Ethernet, UDP/TCP, HTTP are all pretty similar to when they were invented. And even if we’ve “Web 2” and single page applications, all these basics do still apply 20-30 years after their invention!

School

By directly starting with IT basics, development and a bit of systems engineering, we’re also trying to give you a head start at school. You’ll learn a lot of theoretical stuff at school, but it helps if you can adopt it practically afterwards, or even better if you already experienced it in advance.