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Hi! My name is Dylan Dubeau and this past summer, I had a great time interning with Gibraltar Software. I even got to work with the founder of the company, Jay Cincotta. Since I’m only going into my junior year at Glenelg High School, this experience was absolutely amazing. In the past few years, I have grown to love the computer field, and I plan on studying computer science and mathematics when I go to college. So, this internship was the opportunity of a lifetime. Not only did I learn so much, but I also had a lot of fun helping out.
Before this summer, I had only worked with java through my courses in school and some simple programming on my own, but I mainly worked with C# and SQL with Gibraltar. My primary task was to help with the development of internal systems to more easily manage the order and sales processes. By the end of the summer, I actually created a program that the company was able to use for their own purposes. The program I wrote dealt with searching, editing, adding, and deleting items in the company’s database. Interestingly, I also got to learn about Gibraltar’s VistaDB product as part of my assignment. I learned how to write generic ADO.NET code that could work with SQL Server or VistaDB just by changing the connection string.
I also learned about telecommuting. I was able to do a lot of work from home as well as at the office. The code I was working on was shared with the rest of the team using SourceTree with a GitHub repository. It was a pretty cool and relaxed experience to be able to do my work while still in my PJs.
The program I wrote was in C# using Visual Studio 2012 targeting .NET 4.5 and using Entity Framework 6. With coaching from the other guys on the team, I learned how to write what I found to be very complicated and high level programming such as asynchronous code running on a background worker thread to get information from the database. I also used a Concurrent Queue that allowed me to marshal data to the UI thread of a Winforms application.
This internship not only helped me in learn new tools and techniques. More importantly, I got a taste of how programming gets done in the real world. I now have a much better understanding of what it is like to write large programs on a team. This was a tremendous experience for me and I learned a lot while having a great time with my team. I am thankful for the opportunity and plan to build on this experience as I continue my education.
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