{"id":13372,"date":"2023-08-14T15:52:20","date_gmt":"2023-08-14T14:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-voices\/?p=13372"},"modified":"2023-08-14T15:54:14","modified_gmt":"2023-08-14T14:54:14","slug":"computer-science-placement-year-at-couchbase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-voices\/2023\/08\/14\/computer-science-placement-year-at-couchbase\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Science Placement Year at Couchbase"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi all! I’m Stan, and I did a year long industrial placement with Couchbase in their Manchester office. Read on to find out <\/span>what working at a software company is like<\/b>, discover some of <\/span>the skills you need to succeed in the industry,<\/b> and finally, learn some <\/span>unexpected things about careers in software<\/b>!<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Couchbase<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"couchbasemanchesteroffice.jpeg\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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I picked Couchbase <\/a>mainly because I wanted to work in a company where software development is the primary subject, and not just a department on the side enabling other business to occur. Couchbase is headquar<\/span>tered in Santa Clara, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. It touts itself as a “big company with a start-up mindset”. I wasn’t sure if I could totally believed them (turned out I could), but still, it sounded exciting!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The product Couchbase delivers is a high-performance distributed database, delivered both as a software package, and as an SaaS cloud offering. Some similar products you may have heard of are MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and the like. Databases power the “innards” of nearly every application on the market, and so they are a big business sector with many competitors. While you may not have heard of Couchbase, it is used by many big companies such as Tesco, Sky, LinkedIn, and many more.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun fact: the voice chat used in Fortnite is powered by Couchbase! Epic Games incorporates VoIP software from a third party vendor that uses Couchbase internally.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working in the software industry<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I won’t sugar coat it! Like every other intern, I started off on the Support Engineering team. This is probably not what you’re imagining when you think of software development, but it was a genuinely useful experience that helped me learn and solidify the skills I would need later on (more on that below).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months in, I transitioned to my permanent role: <\/span>SRE – Site Reliability Engineer<\/b> on the Reliability & Observability team. You may not have heard of SRE before (but look it up – it’s very hot right now!), but the crux of it is that you’re tasked with making sure that the product – a cloud hosted database in my case – is reliable, available, front-end loads swiftly without errors\u2026 and when inevitably, there are errors, there is enough data available to know what’s wrong and how to fix it.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my placement, I was tasked with spearheading a company wide project: the integration of a third party service provider that would help the Support and SRE teams have more powerful tools at hand for fixing any issues the customers may encounter. My journey took me from piloting this project through the Proof of Concept stage, presenting it in a Zoom meeting to the Senior VP of Engineering in California, and all the way to rolling it out across the three major cloud providers, AWS, GCP, and Azure.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was involved with writing Go code and Terraform configuration to manage the full SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) of the agent necessary for this integration, from deployment across the three cloud providers to programmatically handling upgrades and backend communication. I also got a lot of practice in soft skills: I needed to communicate with both senior leadership on the Couchbase side, as well as the engineering team of the third party provider. I also had to document all the work that I’ve done – I needed to hand it off at the end of my internship and onboard other engineers to enable the project’s maintenance.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skills you’ll develop<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You’re wrong if you think being a software engineer only involves writing code! There’s a wide variety of other technical and soft skills that you must possess to succeed in this role:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n