Saturday, August 10, 2019
IBM is a huge American company! The headquarters are in Armonk, New York and has offices in 170 countries. IBM’s previous name was the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed to “International Business Machines” in 1924.
IBM sells mostly software, middle-ware, and computer hardware, but has been selling everything you can imagine from clocks to cheese cutters (yum cheese!) since the company has been around for many many years.
I was located in the Markham software lab which is the largest software development lab in Canada and IBM’s third largest software lab. The lab has 2,500 employees and teams are working on products such as DB2, and WebSphere Application Server.
I was apart of the Extreme Blue program, which is an internship program that consists of teams of 4 (3 technical interns and 1 business intern) that work with engineers, business managers to develop a proof of concept for an idea as well as a business case to integrate it into IBM’s production line. The Extreme blue program is ran worldwide and we had a chance to meet the other North American teams that were based in North Carolina, San Diego, and Armonk at our Final Expo in NYC!
The goals I had were:
Starting the summer, all the interns went up to Ottawa for orientation, and got the chance to learn more about the Extreme Blue program, and the expectations/break down for the rest of the summer. We got to know the other teams and our individual teams as well as explore Ottawa (and the IBM Ottawa Lab). Coming back to Markham, we hit the road running with the technical aspect of our project, meeting our mentors, and learning about the WebSphere team and their products!
After a few weeks our team had come up with the name WASup which stands for the WebSphere Application Server upgrade. We were working on building an application modernization tool to help clients move from traditional WebSphere to WebSphere Liberty. The cool part of the entire summer was we were in full control of how our application worked, and the tools we were using (minus Java of course!). While working hard on the technical part, we were actively working on our first pitch! Apart of the Extreme Blue program is to give 4 minute presentations each month to sets of executives. This was all to help prepare us for the final expo that was happening in NYC!
During my internship at IBM, we had the opportunity to attend presentation workshops that taught us about executive presence, and professionalism when presenting to people. It taught me a lot about how audiences listen and read presentations and little things you can change to help overcome the presentation anxiety. It was a great experience and one that will stay with me throughout my career.
Looking back at my goals,
Getting comfortable with Java was a bit of a learning curve, it’s been a while since i’ve completed my object oriented course at Guelph and worked professionally with Java. A great resource at IBM was the library at the lab, being able to check out many books about everything on Java was very beneficial.
Using Eclipse as well as getting familiar with maven and such tools was also very new to me. Luckily one of my team members has had lots of experience with Java and getting familiar was easy. I would say I have a pretty solid understanding of Java EE, the basics of servlets, beans, enterprise beans, and how to create the basics of them!
Thankful to the Present to Win workshops we had, I would say that the anxiety that we all felt for our first presentation was gone by the final pitch in NYC. Practising most days to random people/teams we could find at the office (thankful for how huge the Markham lab is) was also a great opportunity for us. During our NYC expo, our pitch was crisp and concise, which felt great afterwards!
As someone who hasn’t taken any commerce course besides Intro to Marketing in first year, working alongside with Dilek (our business intern) was amazing! Dilek constantly explained business terms, how she concluded to numbers of revenue, RIO, NPV, while still challenging us by asking US about the business side of our tool.
With the Red Hat aquisition lots changed with the position of the WebSphere products and how they were offered. As a team, Dilek often sent us lots of resources to understand what this aquistion meant as well as challenge us with questions to help prep us for our NYC pitch and demo. Talking to other extreme blue teams also helped understand how each product fits at IBM and how they compliment each other (also learning the difference between cross-selling vs up-selling)!
Dilek, Patrick, Ryan: Spending 12 weeks with only 3 team members got a little hectic but having such a different indivudal dynamic helped us shape our team harmony in different ways. It was great to have team members that were open to constructive feedback and were always ready to help in the hardest tasks.
Our mentors! (Alasdair, YK, Cindy, Thomas): Having mentors that constantly helped us in times where we were most frustrated and confused was great! It was amazing how we would be stuck on a specific task for a few hours and Alasdair would instantly be able to figure it out, or point us to other IBMers who had such knowledge on a specific technology.
Our manager (Sasa): Sasa spent so much time helping us with our presentation skills, and pitch. He even gave us our little saying at the end of the presentation where we would say “WAS up with your application!” that made lots of dragons and judges laugh.
Our program manager (Jan): Jan was a great resource to understand how the extreme blue program went, planning such fun orientation tasks as well as making us all one big family.