Telia Norway's IT division had summer interns for the first time this summer. 10 students got placed into some of our teams and worked alongside us from mid-june to the end of august. For the students it was an opportunity to learn how it's like to work in a tech company, and also to try their hands on some "real-world" problems. For us at Telia it was a great opportunity to show off what a great place this is to work, and to get help to solve some problems that we have not had the time to do ourselves.
Who were these people, and what did they do?
Google Marketing Platform
Espen Lindstad and Ingvild Oxaas Wie worked together with our business self-service team to set up Google Marketing Platform in their application, including Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize and Data Studio. Their initial task was to implement GA tracking of the most used features in the self-service app, but they ended up implementing tracking of more or less all features in the app, as well as in other projects in our business tech division, and to set up some awesome dashboards in Data Studio that gives the self-service team a lot more user insight to base their decisions on.
Frontend and self-service
Aleksander Asp worked on improving and developing features for the new customer self service solution for OneCall. (onecall.no/mine-sider). Languages and libraries used for this includes SCSS, JS, React, Redux, RegEx and HTML.
Frontend, backend and infrastructure
Georgios Pallikaras worked in the web team, responsible for telia.no and min-side (our consumer self-service app). The first weeks he tried everything from backend .Net to frontend React, working on both the Telia styleguide and min-side. He also go to have a look at the APIs for our frontend channels and our infrastructure. After the first two weeks, he found his interest was in infrastructure so he worked on our setup for telia.no in AWS. This is a .NET application that is hosted on windows servers using IIS which again are hosted in AWS. Our build tool is TeamCity and our deploy tool is Octopus Deploy. His first task was creating an image (AMI), so that a new instance from this image would be able to fetch the latest code and get healthy and start taking request automatically. When this was done, he made it so that once an instance is unhealthy, a new one will automatically spawn, increasing reliability in case the website goes down. Finally, he tried to set up automatic updates of the windows servers, however, he did not have enough time to finish up with this.
Analytics, language courses and process improvement
Identity team summer interns, Miruna Lazar and Svetlana Holmen, worked with several tasks from preparing Tips&Tricks for Slack and Excel till analyzing good practices on how to work with virtual teams. Most of the time they spent in delivering results for the following tasks: Miruna used her data analytics’ background to create several dashboards in Looker to help users make sense of the data, analyze trends and drive decision making. It is aligned with Telia’s current strategy of becoming more User Centric. Svetlana wanted to make the international teams integration into Telia easier. She used her more than 15 years’ experience in project management to set up online and in person Norwegian language classes, exams and a language mentor program to help our Telia collegues get to know each other better across teams as well as improve their Norwegian in a fun way. She also analyzed virtual teams and suggested better ways to improve that process and helped merge several different team spaces in Confluence to simplify the Way of Working for the formerly 2 different teams as well.
Miruna and Svetlana together liked dealing with business processes’ improvements. They mapped, analyzed and initiated improvements to simplify the Telia onboarding process for new hires, both employees and external consultants. Improvements have now been implemented by internal IT support and ordering system, by the person responsible for our firewall and hopefully soon in our access management tool and HR tool as well.
Marcus Tierney and Shobiha Premkumar had a go at experimenting with a new location API based on the mobile network instead of GPS. After iterating through a few ideas of how it could be utilised, they created a proof of concept for a location based game where customers can subsribe to get hints for locations to visit, and get prizes and points in a competition when they find the correct location.
Api development
Jonathan Hermansen and Viktor Solberg worked with implementing a solution for discounts and webdeals for our webshop. This functionality has been made available by our API teams, but the webshop developers had not had the time to do anything about it yet. Jonathan and Viktor developed an API for the frontend channels to use, developed mainly with TypeScript and GraphQL.
Will we see you next year?
As you can see, there are a lot of things you can try your hands on as a summer intern in Telia Norway. Everything from frontend libraries and technologies like React to backend services built on Java or .Net. Business processes, analytics, infrastructure and cloud solutions. Hopefully you will apply for a summer intership with us for next summer. We look forward to getting to know you, and hope you will be as happy as these people:
