Meet our newest intern, Laurens!

Kasia Krzyzanowski — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 12:44:00 +0000

Kasia Krzyzanowski

This week we welcomed a new intern from Saxion University of Applied Science to our team. Meet Laurens Jan van Heek!

Tell us a bit about yourself…

Sure! I have a side job at ‘Student Aan Huis’ where I help people at their homes with all sorts of technical problems with computers, etc. When I’m not busy with school or work, I’m probably binge watching Netflix, while also keeping track of latest bitcoin/altcoin technologies and rates!

On the weekends, I travel home to my parents’ place, where I play soccer with friends on our own team at the local soccer club.

How did you hear about Xablu and why did you want to do an internship here?

Xablu was listed as an internship partner on the Saxion website and after some extensive research, I felt that this was the perfect place for me to go deeper into web/app development and learn new programming languages and techniques. Especially after I saw the blogposts of the other Saxion students who did their internship here.

What is your internship project about?

At first I will be working with the team on an assignment for SafetySuite Oldenzaal. We will be building a web portal where customers can do their administrative tasks. After that, I’ll probably get deeper into app development using the likes of Xamarin, React Native or Flutter.

What do you hope to get out of your internship at Xablu?

I hope to learn new programming languages and techniques to expand my skillset. Besides that, this internship will be a look at how life will be after graduation from school.

What are your future career goals in software/app development?

Since I was young, I’ve always had plans to start my own company! With my latest interest in Artificial Intelligence, I hope to combine the two.

Good luck Laurens! Interested in applying to do your internship or graduation assignment at XABLU? Check out our Careers page for more info.

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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React Native vs Xamarin: A XABLU internship

XABLU HQ — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 12:40:00 +0000

John Doe

By Mattijs Kuhlmann and Mads Lundgaard

After five months at XABLU, we’ve now finished our internship, which was part of our Software Engineering programme at the Saxion University of Applied Science in Enschede. We both had an amazing time here and above all, we learned a lot!

Our assignment: Xamarin vs React Native

When we started, we didn’t know exactly what our assignment was going to be. But by the end of our first day, we had already decided on our main subject: cross-platform app development, specifically focusing on React Native.

As XABLU had been mainly working with the cross-platform app development software Xamarin, we started by comparing Xamarin with React Native by building the same small mobile app with both of these platforms. This was a very fun start as we were completely free in figuring out how everything worked and how we wanted the app to work and look.

After that first assignment we were acclimatised and ready to go a step further. Our colleagues at XABLU already knew almost everything there was to know about Xamarin, but were new to React Native. So together with our internship supervisor, we came up with the idea of a bigger app, completely built with React Native. This app became our main assignment – not really building this app, but more specifically finding out as much as possible about React Native. And believe us, delving into React Native is very fun!

Freedom and hands-on learning

We spent most of our internship building this app, but in between we also did things like help XABLU organize a hackathon at Microsoft Techdays 2017 in Amsterdam. Our internship felt completely different to school, especially because we learned so much while it didn’t feel like we were learning. This was mainly because we were able to learn by making apps and solving all of the problems ourselves. In software engineering, this kind of practical knowledge is definitely the most important, and

we felt like we learned a lot!

Summed up, the technologies we learned to work with were: Xamarin, Visual Studio, React Native, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, Microsoft App Center, and Microsoft Azure, as well as common app development tools like Git and Scrum. Besides that, we learned a lot about company culture. As it was the first time for both of us working in a software company, we learned a lot about how it works in the “real world” compared to at university!

Develop yourself at XABLU

XABLU will give you complete freedom to come up with your own ideas for an assignment or the direction you want your assignment to go! Their only goals are for you to have fun and to develop yourself. You will be treated like anyone else at XABLU, so if you are looking for this kind of freedom and space to develop yourself and if you’re also up for an amazing internship, get in contact with them as soon as possible!