It’s been a few years (maybe not so few…) years since I entered the software development industry and started out my dynamic career that took me from developing software to creating tests that would challenge it to the breaking point! There have been many twists and turns in my journey, as expected, but one thing has remained constant throughout; my appreciation for the ever-evolving technologies that drive us forward.
I can recall my student years filled with curiosity, working on different projects, and attending meetups and conferences to keep up with what was going on in the industry, one of which was EESTEC.
Allow me to take you on a journey on a timeline with my EESTEC experience!
May 2007: I had come across a new conference. It was the first time that Electrical and Computer Engineering Students Conference was taking place and I remember thinking how it was unlike any other. Ok, I had attended conferences mainly organised by the Hellenic Telecommunciations and Post Commission, but this was something different. It was organised by people like us, by students, who wanted to see how science and technology were evolving and wanted to see what is coming next for them — me included of course. It was a relatively small venue, where myself and a group of friends from university, I was a student at the National Technical University of Athens at the time were waiting in a conference room for the conference to start. The presentations were delivered by professors of the field, I can’t recall the topics but what I do remember is the feeling that the experience left me with!
Over a decade and a pandemic later…
April 2022: It’s been a long time since that May, and I’m currently the Chapter Lead of Software Engineers in Test and Infrastructure at Agile Actors living out my early professional dreams of working on exciting projects, implementing the newest technologies and staying at the forefront of the trends. I’m sitting in the office and our communications officer, Reem tells me that ECESCon Patra is going to take place and we are sponsoring the event. Oh, dear! I travelled back 15 years. Without hesitation, I volunteered to be actively and on a Friday morning myself, Alexis, our Chapter Lead of Full stack in Java and Maria, part of our Talent Acquisition team we left for 3 days I was instantly wondering what new graduates are looking for, what should we focus on, but eventually everything came to me naturally. What was I looking for as an attendee 15 years ago? To see the future of the industry, what’s going on in the market, what the latest trends are and what technologies and disciplines to focus on.
Log day 1:
We arrived in the afternoon but got the chance to meet students and have very interesting discussion with. Most questions were in regard to internship opportunities, how can a graduate start their career and how can Agile Actors help. We got the opportunity to explain our unique model and received valuable feedback in the process. We felt their passion for programming and wanted to see how we could help them in their development, discussing what do they want to do and how we can help them start their journey and that was just the beginning, as we had a live demo of a developer’s typical day planned for the next day!
Log day 2:
Today was the big day! We had decided to present something hands-on and what better than to start implementing a Java Spring Boot backend service from scratch. Alexis started implementing the service whilst I was implementing the tests. In what was a very real scenario, he started modelling DB entities at which point I had to stop him… Why? We had discussed nothing about requirements, specs, acceptance criteria — in actual fact we didn’t know WHAT to build. And that’s where our discussion started to give more insights on what we want to implement. This was also probably the most interesting part that someone could take away from the session.
There is no framework or library that can do the trick and be the absolute solution to our problems. Nothing can replace communication and at the end of the day this is the key success factor for delivering and for having a good time in the process! Through a 3-hour session, we tried to put incorporate and present most of what happens during a typical day on the job.
We got very interesting questions and started discussing with attendees. Suddenly I found myself in a time warp yet again, thinking about how at some point I was in their shoes joining the discussion on the presentation with questions and queries, eager to learn as much as I could. We went on and explained how our coaching and mentoring model works and focused a lot on our external coaching model which could potentially be a good fit for a lot of the graduates and open up career opportunities for them. This was of significant interest to the students, as a candidate is taken on by our engineers, who coach and mentor specific to an internal position, ultimately leading to an employment opportunity when successful.
Log day 3:
Final day and after a weekend filled with interesting discussions with students, it was about to time to return to base. What a great experience! Discussing with new joiners in the market and potential new colleagues was very interesting and refreshing. Would I go again? Definitely yes! In the meantime, I am waiting to see the attendees again, but now as new colleagues!
If you want to join the discussion within our Team check out our openings here and apply today!
Til next time!
Top comments (0)