Our experience interning at Oslo Market Solutions
This summer me and Åsmund had the pleasure of working at Oslo Market Solutions on their new website. It was to be built using Gatsby and Netlify, and had to be designed from the ground up.
We were invited to parties, played a lot of ping pong, worked a lot and had a lot of fun but most importantly we learned a lot.
This blog post is a short summary of our months at Oslo Market Solutions.
Who were we?
I was finishing my first year of my master at NTNU Gjøvik, and hadn’t really made any plans for the summer. I was contemplating getting a summer job, but hadn’t really made an effort to get one, when all of the sudden I get a snap from a friend where he is posting a summer internship on Finn.no.
The job was to rebuild a company website using React.
Me, having written my bachelor thesis in React felt like this was something i could, and wanted to do. So I wrote my application, got an interview and luckily got to spend my summer at Oslo Market Solutions.
I was about to finish my second year at NTNU in Trondheim and ready to spend my summer working at the sports store where I had a part time position. In the midst of preparing for finals I got an email asking if I was interested in an interview and the rest is history. It was such a wonderful opportunity, the experience you gain working on a real-life project will put you ahead of the curve. -Åsmund Staldvik
The summer party
Just two days after we joined the team we were invited to the group summer party. Food, drinks, a DJ and sunny warm weather. It was a nice evening and a great opportunity to get to know the team better in a more relaxed setting.
The people
OMS is a small-medium workplace with 18 employees, two of which joined while we were there! It’s a fun and social group of including people, and we were taken well care of our entire stay.
Our days
So how exactly did we spend our days?
“Give us this day our daily standup” says a sign hanging in the office. I had read many horror stories of agile development, and more often than not the villain was standup. But at OMS they do it right, or at least as I’ve learned it in my classes, having a quick 15 min rundown of what everyone is working and/or struggling on. And crucially we’re actually standing!
We were running on one week sprints, and after each sprint we had a “sprint review and planning” meeting, were we would go over last weeks sprint, and plan the next one.
When we joined, the team had some ideas about what they didn’t like about their current web page, what they wanted to add and what they wanted to change, but as to how the website should look there were only some really loose low-fi sketches. We really had a blank canvas. So we had to come up with a design and draw some sketches.
The plan was to make low-fi sketches, then hi-fi sketches and finally code it.
Seems simple, right? As it turns out, designing is really hard…
We really tried our best, but with no real weight on design in any of our bachelors, it just didn’t look like the flashy new company website we were reaching for.
Designer to the rescue!
In the middle of our stay, OMS hired a UX Designer. Not because of the website, but the timing was perfect. He willingly stared redesigning everything we’d done so far, so we could focus all our energy on the code. Suddenly things started flying. He fed us his new designs, and we wrote them as fast as we could, and in a matter of weeks the new flashy company website was done. And it looked the part.
Everyone was really happy with the outcome, and we were proud.
And so our two months internship ended with OMS launching their new website.
Wrapping it up
We both learned a lot, much more than we thought we would, and we are both really happy that we took this opportunity.
We would highly recommend anyone who gets the chance to spend their summer at OMS.
