I feel like I have been handed some level of responsibility

Having met BJSS at a recruitment fair on campus, Joe applied to the company and was successful in obtaining a year in industry - something he was on the other side of this year, when he returned once again to the University, this time to recruit students!

BJSS is quite a young company, only 25 years old and started locally in Leeds, but they now employ over 1000 people and undertake a range of business and IT consultancy work. This means that Joseph has heard about all kinds of projects and technologies during his year.

60 seconds with Joseph Cheverton Wynne

Why did you decide to do a year in industry?

I thought it would be a useful experience and gives me a chance to see what I'm interested in before I graduate and properly join the workforce.

How did you find your year in industry opportunity?

Engineering department graduate and placement fair.

Tell us about project(s) which you have been most involved with whilst on year in industry?

Internal web academy where we used the react, angular and vue frameworks to build simple web apps that interacted with a database. I’ve also worked on AWS training, learning about all the different services that are offered by Amazon for cloud computing and gained a qualification. More recently I’ve been involved with “A government digital transformation project moving largely paper-based processing into an entirely new digital platform; the first of its kind, accredited to process highly sensitive and complex data hosted in a secure cloud environment.”

What do you like about the company you have done your year in industry with?

BJSS have a very laid back feel. Our compulsory hours are 9:30-16:30 when clients will be around and then you can work around that - some people come in at 8:00 and leave at 16:30, others start 9:30 and go until 18:00. There are also various sporting groups - I have joined in with the climbing channel and we go to a local bouldering wall every week. We use slack as our internal work chat platform and amongst all the work-related channels you’ll find channels for pictures of the cats and dogs of BJSS.

What has been the most challenging aspect to undertake a year in industry?

Lots of new technologies that I haven't used at University that is used when developing
software eg jenkins, sonarqube, selenium etc. I’ve also learnt how to write good code - the first few pull requests were pretty brutal! I have gained a lot of understanding of what makes code 'good' and how to get that stage. I’ve also developed my knowledge of Java 3 and learning about streams etc has been really cool and I’m very much a fan of functional features. They make Java nice to use and look at, as impossible as that sounds.

What has been your favourite part of completing a year in industry?

Getting paid to go and do things - I regularly have to travel down to Bristol for my project and had to go to Newcastle for an AWS certification exam. I feel like I have been handed some level of responsibility.

Which part of your degree has helped you with undertaking a year in industry the most?

Java + git knowledge. Version control is super important when the main repository is 100,000 lines of Java with many people working on it. I hadn’t used git rebase before at university, but it has been very useful for combining everyone’s code where merging has been a massive pain.

What do you hope to do after you graduate?

I’m not 100% sure yet, but I can’t wait! I’ve really enjoyed my time here so far.

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