Inside Tekside Reflections of a Co-op student
Over the past 8-months I’ve had the opportunity to work along side a team of brilliant software developers and engineers at Tekside.io on some large scale projects that even recently made the news.
Tekside.io is a Martech company which has its roots in email marketing and has grown to be a leading company which now works with large national brands across north america to provide expert solutions and industry leading service. It’s close ties with indox marketer and It’s connections with major brands has allowed Tekside to stretch beyond simple Martech and transform into an IT consulting and solutions company which now works with SaaS and software development.
Throughout my time at Tekside.io I was able to perfect my skills and develop many new ones in fields I’ve been interested in that got me passionate about computer systems and IoT. With it’s start-up vibes, I was able to work on currently indamand technologies like azure cloud, machine learning and script automation.
Tekside.io was different from any other co-op I’ve had before. It is a company that is very much in it’s early stages and as a result it gives off major start-up vibes and a “go fast break things” mentality with senior staff that are very capable of fixing these broken things. Overall, it always gave me the sense of freedom to learn and the security to know someone on my team would be able to catch me if I ever did something dangerous. This allowed me to grow in many ways, both as a developer and a student. My work spanned across many industries and various corporations; Tekside works with government enterprises like LCBO and Calgary Airport Authority and private business like Golf Town. I was handling bugs in real time and involved in implements fixes and features requested from the client.
Some of the goals I had when I first entered this role were to gain experience working with large data sets and AI. This wasn’t something I had the opportunity to learn in a institutional environment, Tekside however had a large collection of emails incoming and outgoing which gave me the opportunity to work on and with data in a capacity I’ve never done so before. The main goal of this project was to feed this data into a machine learning algorithm to analyze and categorize data that grows more accurate the longer it is used. In our present world where everyone uses and throws around terms like “AI” and “machine learning” it was really exciting to develop the understanding to how these processes are created and managed as these skills will only become more valuable as this technology becomes more fleshed out. All the while adding tangible benefit to the company and seeing code I created and contributed to used in something larger than I.
As great as my time at Tekside was I can admit it wasn’t all fun and games with exciting new projects to work on. I got the opportunity to see the many ways software teams can make mistakes and how poor software design choices can snowball and turn into financial headaches for companies the longer they’re left ignored. This technical debt which grows and transforms into a problem that doesn’t make any real sense to fix can lead to entire codebases to be scraped and recreated a new. The importance of scalability and abstraction which have been topics I too have tried to block out became ever present during my tenure and made me revaluate my approach to development and made me seek out ways to improve my foresight when looking for solutions.
