From May 2022 to April 2024 I was part of the Collatum IT team. During my time there, I gained valuable hands-on experience in web development using a variety of modern technologies that I had never worked with before. The Collatum team is not only highly skilled, but also incredibly welcoming and supportive, which contributed greatly to my excellent experience there.

On the front end, I got to work with technologies like Angular, Ionic, and Socket.io, among many others. These helped me contribute to web applications that required a focus on responsive design and seamless user interaction. All of the projects I worked on helped me build skills in developing modern web interfaces with real-time data communication.

On the backend, we mainly wrote Kotlin code in the Spring Boot framework, using MongoDB as our database of choice. Spring Boot is a great starting point for developing a well-rounded understanding of backend services, API design, and database management. I also learned a lot of other practical things, such as using tools like postman and curl to increase my efficiency when testing an API.

Our development and deployment processes involved Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and a few other technologies, which taught me about containerization and professional orchestration. I also became familiar with Git, GitHub Actions, and automated pipelines to streamline the development process.

During my time at Collatum IT, I not only gained technical experience, but our team also had the unique opportunity to give two workshops for computer science students at FH Aachen. The first one in October 2022 and the second one in November 2023. The topics we covered were Java basics, H2 databases and JPA, Spring Boot, REST services and JSON, and Angular basics. Preparing and helping to run the workshops was very rewarding and it was fascinating to teach other students topics that I am passionate about myself.

Aside from all the technical knowledge and work experience, however, what really made my time at Collatum IT so great was the team I had the pleasure of working with. The drive for collaboration, the shared desire to always improve, and the willingness of more experienced team members to share knowledge created an inspiring environment where I felt constantly encouraged to grow as a programmer.

Looking back, my time at Collatum IT has been a fulfilling experience. I look forward to applying the skills and lessons I’ve learned to future challenges, always remembering the supportive environment Collatum IT provided.

If anyone from the Collatum team is reading this: Thanks again for everything! :)