Rockstar Interview
A subsidiary of KPN, RoutIT develops and delivers Internet, cloud, connectivity, and communications solutions for the business market. The total ICT spectrum is addressed here: from providing business mobile and hosted telephony, Internet connections, alarm systems to security solutions and 24/7 support. RoutIT has a clear focus: namely, to develop and offer secure and innovative products and services that allow the partner to be and remain successful. In this project, I am working on the internationalization of the application Irma.
“Every day you work together on complex pieces of software.”
Daan Joling, C# Engineer
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THIS PROJECT?
RoutIT gave a warm and professional feeling upon entry. My desire for my next project was to rotate in a large software department. This aligns with RoutIT’s department, which is over 30 people. The software department is divided into several teams, each specializing in a domain. There is rotation within the teams, which keeps the work versatile. I myself studied Technical Computer Science, where you come into contact with hardware and networks. I felt it was important to reflect some of this in my project. Both topics are in RoutIT’s core business.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF WITHIN THIS PROJECT?
Together with Rockstar colleague Joey and a senior developer from RoutIT, we started internationalizing Irma. Irma is an application from RoutIT where partners can order their products. Within Irma, RoutIT is working to make its products available to the German market. Irma was set up as a monolingual application; it is up to us to make it more generic. What made this project interesting was its versatility. We have been working on being able to switch languages within Irma, being able to send German invoices, displaying appropriate user agreements and creating multilingual news and event messages. The latter is what I am most proud of. Joey and I were able to provide a design and then were completely free to implement it within Irma.
What techniques tooling did you use?
Within the software department, we use Visual Studio, TFS, GIT, JIRA and Sql server. RoutIT strives to work with the latest versions of the above tooling. I myself am currently programming full stack ( C#, Javascript, cshtml and SQL ), the department also uses Angular.
WHAT DID THE PROJECT DELIVER TO THE TARGET AUDIENCE/USER?
The international project now makes it possible for RoutIT’s German partners and staff to understand Irma. Before, everything was Dutch, which is incomprehensible to a person unfamiliar with the language. Furthermore, it is possible to send news and event messages to Partners in multiple languages. Dutch invoices are different from German invoices. Consider field names, VAT codes and invoice numbers. Based on whether it is a German or Dutch partner, the correct invoices are now sent to the partner.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN THE PROJECT?
Every day I learn something new at RoutIT. By working a lot with the seniors at RoutIT, I learned new design patterns. RoutIT works with code reviews, which means you get feedback on your written software. The benefit of code reviews is that it keeps each other on their toes, prevents errors early in development and lifts the level. Not only did I learn software skills, but I also gained knowledge about business processes. The business processes within RoutIT are professional and clear. Here, a developer is given a ready-made document with what is expected. After this, the developer is free to make his own interpretation. By having clearly defined requirements in advance, it saves confusion, allowing us to focus on what we love … namely development!
WHAT MADE TEAM ROCKSTARS IT-WORTHY?
To me, a Rockstar-worthy project represents complexity, collaboration, being able to make a contribution, and developing beautiful understandable software. The project at RoutIT meets all the criteria listed. Working together daily on complex pieces of software and striving for the best results. Of course, there is also more than enough room for socializing 😉.
