My NewRedo Work Placement

I thoroughly enjoyed my 10-day work placement at NewRedo as I gained many valuable skills and experiences, many of which would not have been available through university alone. Everyone at NewRedo was exceptionally supportive and welcoming during my time there and I felt I formed genuine connections with many of them through one-to-one meetings and social activities. I’m especially grateful for the planning Jonathan and Alan put into my placement. It was clearly designed in a way to give me a complete and authentic experience of what it’s like working as a NewRedo software developer, which is exactly what I had hoped to gain from this experience. I truly felt like a part of the team and greatly appreciated the opportunity to be a part of it.

Week 1: Introduction and Meetings

My first week consisted mostly of a variety of meetings, some coding and even a team away day, which was a real treat to be a part of and an excellent way to get to know everyone early on.

The sprint planning, project estimation, demo sessions and daily stand-ups showed me the team’s general workflow and how they plan, track, evaluate and collaborate on work across multiple clients and projects.

The retrospective, on the other hand, showed me how the team regularly evaluates and adapts its workflow, which is an excellent real-world example of agile principles in action. This meeting also nicely demonstrates how the whole team is involved in high-level decisions, which helps everyone feel valued and heard.

The one-on-one meetings were a great way to get to know team members personally and learn about their roles and time at NewRedo. It was also a chance for me to ask questions, get advice and learn about their career journeys and experience in the industry. A number of these meetings included demos, where team members walked me through tools like GitHub (and how to use it professionally as part of a team), Jira, testing practices, and their current projects, all of which I found extremely helpful.

Additionally, I had a few extra meetings with Alan to guide me through coding tasks, and with Royd, who spoke about agile principles and a history of the industry, which I found really interesting.

Week 2: Developer Work

In my second week, I began working closely with Chad, who helped me finish connecting the single sign-on with Keycloak and to create a Dockerfile. On Tuesday, I worked with Ivelina to get my project running locally using Docker. Finally, I spent the rest of the week collaborating with Alan to deploy my project to a cloud instance using AWS.

During this time, I also made general improvements to my project (including UI design, fixing a middleware issue, adding a README and removing unnecessary files) while practicing version control and team workflows using Git.

This week also introduced me to some new meetings, one of which was the weekly tech clinic. In these meetings, all developers get together to discuss and solve each other's problems before the end of the week, which was surprisingly effective given the number of issues raised this week. The other was a follow-up meeting on a topic raised in the previous week's retrospective; again showing agile principles through feedback and reflection.

Although I wasn’t directly involved, I noticed a lot of ongoing communication and feedback between the team and clients through Jira, emails, meetings and demos. The amount of back-and-forth for every step surprised me, but made a lot of sense to ensure the clients receive something expected that meets their exact requirements.

Beyond Work: Team Activities

In addition to the work I’ve described above, there were several social activities which I thoroughly enjoyed. The main activities included getting lunch with members of the team at places like Mommy Thai, Rudy’s Pizza, and Kirkgate Market, which was my favourite, and going to a few different pubs. We also played darts and curling as part of the team away day, where I was surprisingly victorious at darts despite not really playing before. Overall, I enjoyed getting to know everyone and the conversations we shared.

Key Takeaways: Skills and Knowledge Gained

General Skills and Knowledge

• Understanding agile workflows and how to apply them to my own work
• Collaborating and communicating in a team (which was especially important due to my slightly messy and disorganised group project at university)
• Insight into how tech consultants operate and the business roles involved
• Experiencing what it’s like to be a modern software developer (including remote working, how the role evolved and will evolve over time)
• Learning what it means to be a thought leader and why it’s desirable

Technical Skills and Knowledge

• Implementing Single Sign On with Keycloak and understanding why it’s used
• Using Docker to run applications and understanding its benefits
• Deploying applications to cloud instances using AWS
• Using Jira to manage work, track tasks/projects and set workflows (learning key aspects such as tickets, user stories, backlog, service desk, kanban board)
• Understanding and using GitHub in team workflows, professionally and with new commands
• Navigating projects written by other developers
• Learning about other technologies and techniques such as v0, Copilot, TDD and many additional helpful tools, resources and insights shared by the team

Conclusion: Reflection and Thanks

My time at NewRedo has been an amazing experience. The environment was incredibly friendly and relaxed, and everyone I spoke to was very helpful, interesting and friendly. I felt like part of the team and would love to return in the future, if the opportunity arises.

I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity and everything that I’ve learned; in particular for helping me gain a much clearer understanding of what being a software developer actually looks like. I’m excited to apply these lessons to personal and university projects and develop a greater understanding of these areas. This opportunity has given me valuable insights and a lot to think about.

Finally, a huge thank you to everyone who helped organise this placement and to all those I met during my time here. You were all incredibly welcoming and supportive.

Thank you again for the opportunity.