After five months at XABLU, we’ve now finished our internship, which was part of our Software Engineering programme at the Saxion University of Applied Science in Enschede. We both had an amazing time here and above all, we learned a lot!
When we started, we didn’t know exactly what our assignment was going to be. But by the end of our first day, we had already decided on our main subject: cross-platform app development, specifically focusing on React Native.
As XABLU had been mainly working with the cross-platform app development software Xamarin, we started by comparing Xamarin with React Native by building the same small mobile app with both of these platforms. This was a very fun start as we were completely free in figuring out how everything worked and how we wanted the app to work and look.
After that first assignment we were acclimatised and ready to go a step further. Our colleagues at XABLU already knew almost everything there was to know about Xamarin, but were new to React Native. So together with our internship supervisor, we came up with the idea of a bigger app, completely built with React Native. This app became our main assignment – not really building this app, but more specifically finding out as much as possible about React Native. And believe us, delving into React Native is very fun!
We spent most of our internship building this app, but in between we also did things like help XABLU organize a hackathon at Microsoft Techdays 2017 in Amsterdam. Our internship felt completely different to school, especially because we learned so much while it didn’t feel like we were learning. This was mainly because we were able to learn by making apps and solving all of the problems ourselves. In software engineering, this kind of practical knowledge is definitely the most important, and
we felt like we learned a lot!
Summed up, the technologies we learned to work with were: Xamarin, Visual Studio, React Native, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, Microsoft App Center, and Microsoft Azure, as well as common app development tools like Git and Scrum. Besides that, we learned a lot about company culture. As it was the first time for both of us working in a software company, we learned a lot about how it works in the “real world” compared to at university!
XABLU will give you complete freedom to come up with your own ideas for an assignment or the direction you want your assignment to go! Their only goals are for you to have fun and to develop yourself. You will be treated like anyone else at XABLU, so if you are looking for this kind of freedom and space to develop yourself and if you’re also up for an amazing internship, get in contact with them as soon as possible!
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