What was your journey before BeCode?
Few years before BeCode I was going trough a “promotion social” learning process for a electrician certification. I had the chance to finish my study and receive this certification which enabled me the possibility of continuing with an internship and then also start working. But as you can see now, I never liked the job and it was kind of forced on me because of my life situation.
How did you live your training at BeCode?
As one of the First BeCode student I didn’t expect much out of it in the beginning. I just wanted something new, something that would put my future on a new path.
In few words, I liked the whole course very much. The collaboration with other students and team working were very nice. But also the kind of “familial” atmosphere that we made at Anderlecht, it was never in my mind at the beginning of the process that we could achieve that much as a group!
Technically, what did you learn?
Those questions are kind of tricky for me because I didn’t have any expectation at the beginning but going trough the course month by month gave me the opportunity to push multiple techno’s like PHP framework for example which is funny but are not really useful for me at work. But I think BeCode had a high impact on how I am now, meaning self reliable, problem solving and kind of creative. It might not be considered as a programming skill but I am sure that BeCode showed me how to organize my time but most of all how to learn whatever I want when I want it and this part is very important for me in my everyday work because thanks to that I was capable of working on projects and also learning new technologies at the same time.
How did you find your internship?
First of all there was already something in my mind when I started, as I knew BeCode was sponsored by Telenet and I liked very much Telenet services so I wanted to see what is possible on the path to joining them. First steps to that was asking Emily (my coach) about what should I do if I’d like to have an internship at Telenet, her answer was to contact Cedric (C.O.O. of BeCode) and so I did. But of course I didn’t have much expectation at the time because how would it be possible to join a corporate company like Telenet without any Certifications? Anyway the time was going and no feedback from Telenet Human Resources so my hope was going down and down but I didn’t give up and pushed asking Cedric again and again why there isn’t any follow up to my request. In the meantime I was trying to look for different options by calling different companies but nothing was good enough for me. And I think this was because of my mindset being set to Telenet already by the start of the BeCode course. But at the end, I got feedback from Telenet and I was asked to go for an interview with Rajiv Seesurn (Telenet Innovation Center Director) at Woluwe. They for sure wanted to know what is BeCode how it worked and what would be the value of getting me in team so I explained them that BeCode students have this kind of flexibility and ability to learn that other people might not because of the kind of training we followed. I told them that I am not afraid to learn, I like innovation and want to have a creative and “futuristic” job.
And that’s how I got in.
What’s next?
Well first three months of my internship was quite intense in terms of learning, as we were going into Internet of Things I needed to learn a lot around this scope. I was testing and playing with the NB-IOT technology. But there is something I forgot, when I started Telenet Innovation Center was just opened and not much was going on there by then, but I tried my best to integrate with the team and give them suggestion about what we would need to process further in the expected scoped. We started buying Arduino’s, Amazon Alexa’s, NB-IOT Shields, Raspberry Pi and a lot more. And from that moment I was doing Arduino programming, playing with bits and bytes, translating binary into hex, hex into string but most of all following protocol convention like MQTT, AMQP, UDP, TCP, TLS, etc... About the project there isn’t to much I can say but Iwas involved mainly in the development of the Telenet Pet Tracker.
https://static.telenet.be/oauth2/assets/movies/Pettracker-fr.mp4
And now going further and further into the Internet of Thing world and all of that following innovative technologies!
