Bivrost

At Kelda we’ve had quite a few interns the last years. The last six months several students have been working with our online data portal Bivrost. This data portal stores and visualizes all our field data from drilling and provide a simple interface for analysis and downloading of data for our clients. Thomas is one of these interns which has been an important part of the development team the last six months when Bivrost went from being a somewhat immature product to a fully functional product we can license out to our clients. He studies at Mines ParisTech in France as most of our interns has done so far. Without further ado, I would like to introduce Thomas.

First of all, you’ve been here for nearly 6 months now, how has your overall stay been?

It’s been great! This is my first real working experience and it was very interesting doing it in Norway. My stay at Kelda was my first of two internships which I chose to do at my school. Actually, the last six months had many “firsts”. First job, first internship, first time I’ve done development and coding in large scale and also my first time in Norway.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from in France and how did you end up at your school?

I’m 21 years old and grew up in Arras in Northern France, quite close to Belgium. When I finished high school I knew I wanted to become an engineer and therefore I chose to start pre-engineering school. This is a school with a high focus on mathematics and preparing us for further engineering education later. After finishing this school I applied for several universities, but Mines was highest ranked and located in Paris. I really wanted to live somewhere central and therefore Mines was something I wanted. Seen in hindsight, I’m really happy with my choice and I’ve really enjoyed my education so far.

Can you tell us a little bit about your interests and the direction you have chosen at your school?

The direction of study I selected at Mines is called Engineering Design & Management. It is a wide topic but focuses mainly on finding and developing new concepts. The field of use is quite wide, and we learn that these skills can be utilized in many different fields.

How did you hear about Kelda, and what made you want to go here?

I first heard about Kelda from the president of ASTI, a student organization at our school. Kelda is a partner of ASTI and the president for the organization sent out an email about Kelda. Later, I received an email from Pierre-Nicolas, which were doing an internship at Kelda at the time. Pierre-Nicolas’ email described the work environment at Kelda and was inspiring. These emails triggered my interest and made me apply for an internship at Kelda.

When you arrived in June, we had quite a large team working together on the Bivrost project. Due to this reason we started working with Scrum, how was it work in a big team and what did you like with the way we worked with Scrum?

The big team we had, in the beginning, was fun and the first couple of weeks we did a workshop together to learn as much as possible before Pierre-Nicolas had to leave. We started using the different packages of Bivrost and doing some small bugfixes as an introduction to working with Bivrost. When we finished this introduction we started working using the Scrum technique. I’ve never used Scrum before, but as most work environments are new to me it was easy to adapt. Working as a team together and solving a specific problem was interesting and fun. It was both hard and motivating to have two weeks deadlines to finish the sprint goal. Especially in the beginning we often overestimated how much we could do in two weeks, but after a few sprints we learned and got better.

After one and a half month, our previous intern Pierre Nicolas left, and you took up the role of Scrum master for the rest of the team. How did you like that role, and how has it worked out do you think?

I liked the role of Scrum master very much. Especially the part of being more part of the planning of the tasks and communicating with the product owner. By doing this work I felt more invested in the product and also had a larger impact on the direction of development the product was going to take than I would have had as a pure developer. As a Scrum master, I had to do more administration to ensure that all tasks were up to date and help the product owner maintaining the backlog. This administration was interesting, but also hard as I often want to start doing the actual implementation.

Since you arrived the Bivrost project has taken huge steps and is now being shipped out to our customers. How do you feel about other people (outside Kelda) now starting to use it, is it motivating?

I feel that my internship here can be divided into two main parts. In the first half, we worked a lot with improving the Bivrost already existing Bivrost features to make it more user-friendly and robust. In this period, releasing the code to production was a really big step. Then, when we did the first major release we started having a lot of users, first from other Kelda employees, then external users. This resulted in a stream of feedbacks, from small bugs to minor features that would enhance the user experience. In this period we learned to do more rapid releases and hotfixes to make Bivrost more useful. I also noticed that testing is very hard, we don’t use the same features as the users of Bivrost, which we immediately saw when we got more users. What was really motivating with this period was the immediate feedback we got from the users and also seeing how our features were used right away.

Within your time here you have been part of a major database upgrade, a total redesign of the user interface and the implementation of several new features on the front and backend. For sure, we can call you a full-stack developer now, right? 

Well… I guess. I actually think I did most frontend work during my internship, but still, I had to work with databases a lot on the backend. On the frontend, the main part of my work was the redesign of the user interface, which was very interesting. I had to really twist my head from the perspective of the developer and try to envision how a user would like to use Bivrost. In the process of redesigning the UI, we looked at many other websites, such as Facebook, Gmail, Bitbucket and Asana for inspiration. I feel that this exercise thought me a lot about thinking like a user.

Did you have much experience in web developing before arriving here, or have you learned most of it during your internship?

I actually feel I learned most of my development skills during this internship. For instance, we use many libraries in the Bivrost development that I’ve never used before. As I mentioned earlier, we had a workshop during the first two weeks where we worked together with Pierre-Nicolas that was here before us. In this period I learned really much. I also got a few tutorials before I arrived and I used them to learn the basics. Before I got to Kelda I’ve bearly used Javascript. I had some more experience using Python and quite much experience from Java. I feel that when you know one programming language it’s much easier to learn another one. Another part of the training was to learn how to write good code. The interns before us developed a style guide together with Kelda. We have used this style guide and continued to develop it.

After working with web development for almost half a year now, do you have a favorite framework? And what frameworks don’t you like working with?

What I find most fun is processing data and making code for displaying data on the frontend. React and Material UI is powerful frameworks for this. I also enjoy doing the logic behind the data processing. I think it’s very hard to find something I don’t like, but if I can avoid it I try not to do too much D3.js. This is a low-level framework for creating dynamic and interactive data visualization. If possible I would like someone else to work with D3, hehe. However, you can make some really beautiful things using D3.

Can you mention some of the main packages you’ve worked with?

The main packages/frameworks I’ve worked with are Material UI, React, D3, Redux, Meteor packages. Python and javascript. All these packages are used extensively in Bivrost.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in your internship, especially related to the development you have done here?

This was a hard question. What comes to mind is the module we have for exporting data from Bivrost. It was made a long time ago and has been modified by several people. It was really hard digging into and understanding the code. You sort of get a “WOW” feeling reading it, and thinks: “What is going on here”. The task itself was not the hardest, but making use and building upon what others have done when they are not here to explain was challenging.

What do you think about Norway as a country? While you were here we had the warmest summer in 70 years. Did you notice the warm weather, or is it just a usual summer in France?

I enjoyed the Norwegian summer really much. It was very warm, but not unusual compared to France. Now in November, it’s really getting cold and dark and it’s harder to be here. The summers are really different from France. I remember walking home at 2AM in the night during the summer and it was really light outside. We don’t have that in France. In the summer we also barbecued a lot and had a lot of fun outdoors. I’ve also had the chance to travel a bit while being in Norway. I went to Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, so I feel I’ve visited quite many of the Nordic countries. Porsgrunn is also a very nice city and we have a view of the fjord from our office space.

Has this work been something you would return to? 

I really enjoyed the work and would absolutely want to do similar work in the future, especially frontend work. It’s very interesting working together with other people and getting feedback on what you’re doing. For my next internship, I want to stay in a bigger city. Even though Porsgrunn was really nice it’s fun being in a larger city also.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to the Kelda Blog editorial office. Before we let you go, can you tell us a little bit about what you plan for your next internship? Also, where do you want to be in the future? Do you imagine yourself working as a developer or are there other career paths that interest you more?

I haven’t found my next internship yet, however, I’m considering companies in London and Brussels. If I choose to go to London the work will be similar to what I’ve done here at Kelda, while in Brussels it would be directed more towards IoT and working with hardware.

Based on my experience from this internship I would absolutely like to stay an engineer, but not only do development. I really enjoyed being part in the decision making and being a scrum master. I hope to be able to do some work that includes planning, discussing and getting direct feedback. It’s motivating to know what we want to do and where we want to go with any development.

Again, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Good luck in your time ahead!