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Two-way learning

July 28, 2020

A new beginning

With challenge comes opportunity.  The last few months has certainly presented a number of challenges but through this, we have also taken the opportunity to recruit Jen Carter as a placement student from the University of Sunderland.  Jen will be sharing her journey over the coming 12 months as she supports the team through the on-going development of GluIQ.

The first week of my placement began under the unusual circumstances of social distancing and remote working due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Welcomed to the team, my first day enabled me to see around the office space. We will hopefully be able to work here soon, when social distancing measures have been relaxed. I also explored the GluIQ web application to get a full understanding of the system and how it works.

My first tasks were to complete two online tutorials for PyCharm, the Python IDE, and the Django web application framework, respectively. I have some experience with Python from my ‘Internet of Things’ module in the second year of my degree course. Django was a framework that I had never used before, so it was exciting to learn a powerful new technology for building web applications.

At the end of the week, I was tasked with a development challenge where I had to create a web application for sharing documents with users via an admin account. I enjoyed the challenge of applying the knowledge learned from the tutorials to get a better understanding of the uses of Django.  I hope to expand my skills further using this framework over the next few weeks.

Overall, the team have made me feel very welcome despite this strange, remote-working world we find ourselves in for the moment. I’m looking forward to the coming year with GluIQ.