Jack Rankin is new to the tech industry in Northern Ireland, beginning his career as a placement student at Anaeko. Jack’s position as Placement Software Engineer has allowed him to develop his technical skill set across multiple disciplines such as AWS and Java. His enthusiasm to develop and innovate has made Jack a great asset and valuable team member at Anaeko.

What is a Placement Software Engineer

As a Placement Software Engineer at Anaeko, you will work on projects where you can make a real difference to people’s lives and help develop solutions on a global scale. A placement position allows you to implement your ongoing academic study in real time, and develop your skills as an Engineer in multiple disciplines and work on many projects.

You receive great support and mentoring, balanced with the experience of being given real, meaningful work to do, to help you truly develop both technically and professionally. You will learn from our experienced developers, project managers and customer-facing staff.

You will be responsible for:

• Developing high quality solutions which impact the lives of users worldwide.
  
• Working as part of a team to solve problems and produce innovative software solutions.
  
•  Learning about new technologies and approaches, with talented colleagues who will help you learn, develop and grow.
  
•  Developing excellent technical, team-working and Agile project experience.
  
• Contributing to peer reviews of designs, code and test specifications
  
• Continuous innovation and improvement

Placement Software Engineer Skills

Communication Skills

It’s extremely rare that Software Engineers work in isolation. In fact, what separates Software Engineers from similar roles like Software Developers tends to be the amount of high-level collaboration, leadership, and team building required of a Software Engineer – and communication skills are key to all of that. Software Engineers should be able to clearly communicate – in writing and orally – with virtually any type of team or company stakeholder, regardless of that person’s technical background.

Team Player

Software Engineers typically work as part of a team – or leading one – and creating or maintaining great software programs requires the input and expertise of a great number of people. Success or failure will be shared by that team. Successful Software Engineers must understand how to compromise, how to motivate others to deliver the best work they’re capable of, and how to take and learn from criticism.

Problem Solving

Successfully steering software development projects to completion requires quickly identifying and solving a lot of issues along the way. Software Engineers must be curious and creative problem-solvers, able to sift through code to pinpoint a programming error while also anticipating other issues before they arise and adapting quickly to solve them.

Attention to Detail

Software Engineers are expected to be precise and meticulous, with a high level of attention to detail applied to everything from coding to testing to documenting projects. Some software engineering industry best practices – like using version control systems to keep track of old work – fall into this category of soft skills.

JACK RANKIN ON WORKING AT ANAEKO

TIM : Hi Jack, do you want to introduce yourself, and your position within Anaeko?

JACK: My name is Jack Rankin, and I am a placement software engineer at Anaeko.

TIM: Perfect, so how would you summarise what you do on a daily basis, what does a placement software engineers day look like?

JACK: My day to day is a concurrent development of an AWS Connect system, where it is up to me to relay any issues or further developments of the product. Along with any further training I may be completing at the time.

TIM: And how long have you worked for Anaeko and what made you want to work for the company?

JACK: I have been working with Anaeko for eleven months. So I haven’t been here for long, but it is fantastic to see the progress I have made in such a short space of time.

One of the main reasons I want to continue working at Anaeko is the people within the company, I have had amazing people around me helping me from the start and till this day. They have helped me build my knowledge and experience. Another reason is the amount of learning which has enhanced my overall skills massively in multiple different sectors.

My current Job is incomparable to any previous roles I have had, the environment and the people within Anaeko allow for an incredibly good atmosphere, being that it is my first IT role there was a lot of challenges and problems which I would encounter but the people around me allowed me to get through any of these issues with ease. Communication is also a very big thing at Anaeko whereas to other roles/jobs I have had communication has just been at a bare minimum.

TIM: Tell me about a recent project you worked on or a nice encounter you had with a co-worker.

JACK: The last project I worked on, which lasted around eight months, was amazing as the experience working with my colleagues like Liam, Daire, Daniel and Varhsa was a valuable learning tool. 

TIM:  What do you look forward to most at work? 

JACK: The thing to which I look forward to may be a cliché answer, but it is the learning for me! To be around people with heavy amounts of experience and a lot of new technologies has been invaluable and makes the work environment dynamic.

If a career at Anaeko sounds like the perfect fit for you, or someone you know! View our current vacancies HERE.

In May this year, Catalyst launched their Basecamp Boston programme with an open call encouraging applications from innovation-driven enterprises based in Northern Ireland that have a product ready to enter the US market, are eager to develop a go-to-market strategy and have a budget to implement US expansion over the next two years. Following the open call, Anaeko are happy to report that we were successful in securing a place on this years cohort. 

What is Basecamp Boston?

Basecamp Boston is an exciting new initiative developed by Catalyst with support from the Department for the Economy, which has been designed to forge solid connections between Northern Ireland businesses and the US to accelerate growth.

Independent research commissioned by Catalyst identified a supportive network of mentors as critical to accelerating NI companies’ path to scale in the US.  By supporting scaling companies and connecting them with a range of business experts who can help with their specific needs, Basecamp Boston has the potential to generate exponential economic impact.

With the signing of the Boston and Belfast Sister Cities agreement, Boston is the ideal launchpad for Northern Irish businesses as it builds on our existing relationships and the strength of Entrepreneurship, Health & Life Sciences, and FinTech.

The programme connects NI companies with established experts and experienced executives in the US market – providing the insights they need to scale their business

Who should apply?

The programme is open to innovation driven enterprises from NI who have a product ready to enter the US market, are eager to develop a go-to-market strategy and have budget to implement US expansion over the next two years.

The ideal candidates would be operating within the following cluster areas:​

• FinTech / CyberTech / Big Data / RegTech
  
• Life Sciences / MedTech / BioTech / Pharma
  
• GreenTech / AgriTech / Advanced Manufacturing / Renewables

Accessing the US Market

This is a unique opportunity to accelerate your path into the US Market with the support of a bespoke set of mentors who can provide insight and connections to help you succeed. The Catalyst team will work with you to identify your needs and leverage a set of trusted business connectors to access appropriate mentors.

Participation in Basecamp Boston has the potential to address specific challenges of expanding your business in the US by exploring issues such as employment needs, market legislation, understanding distribution networks, competitors, go-to-market strategies, legal support, migration laws, and providing relevant sector insights. This programme could help you to forge new business partners, access potential investors and provide a platform for product positioning.

As part of the offering each NI Company will have the opportunity to identify US mentors who they feel will have the biggest impact on their business to travel to Belfast in early November for our follow up event Decamp Bostonto Belfast. This second phase of the programme is designed to help deepen the engagement and formalise long-term US relationships.

When we talk about hybrid cloud we’re talking about firstly organisations that are using both on-premise private cloud and public cloud offerings and secondly have applications that move between them.

There are various forms of those, for example we have worked on projects where a single application running in an environment is accessing data on private and public cloud because there are different benefits. We have also worked with applications that can move from on-premise into a cloud environment.

In multi-cloud what we’re talking about is using one or more cloud offerings. One survey looked across large enterprises. 94% of them are using hybrid cloud and that’s because they had a traditional legacy of on-premise applications but they are also adopting new cloud analytics and innovative applications, slowly transforming the organisation through digital transformation. 67% of those organisations were multi-cloud through circumstance where they have for example built up, through acquisition, two different sets of technology stacks maybe AWS and Azure.

We are starting to see an acceleration in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption so while large enterprises had adopted that journey, and were on a strategy, some organisations were caught off guard, it wasn’t that they hadn’t thought about it, they just realised with a private managed data centre all of a sudden they had to support a broad range of remote workers. This has now triggered a greater appreciation for what we call best fit cloud strategies.

Best fit is choosing the workload to work in the right place and storing data in the right place. Managing your network, policy and government governance accordingly. Hybrid cloud is sometimes a tactical step as a way to get towards a multi-cloud strategy because hybrid cloud bridges the on-premise enterprise environment and new innovative workloads. For example machine learning, AI and multi-cloud gives this great opportunity to accelerate and innovate.

Different public cloud providers are releasing new services and you can take the best from each of the different clouds. This encourages competition, drives price competitiveness and increases service delivery. We’ve seen this across our clients with an increased demand for cloud assessments, cloud readiness, what workloads can work where, and interoperability services.

So how can you move applications that work from one side to work with another? Our clients have come from a broad range of domains from the telecoms background to public sector central government, health’s private sector, and a range of innovators who are using advanced capabilities of cloud scalability to deliver new disruptive services. They all agree on the same benefits and challenges:

• – Increased agility
• – Cherry-pick the best technologies
• – Optimise cost
• – More than one cloud and more than one technology stack means spreading investment in training and hiring 

Within multi-cloud environments a framework we often use is the design, build and operate model. Doing discoveries to understand the problem, in an agile way, and getting a new product or service to market quickly. Combining all the parts that make up these complex services from the sensor devices to network infrastructure, whether that’s on premise or other service platforms. Those applications are incrementally released and managed for internal line of business and customer facing services. 

DevOps really is about bringing design, development and operations together through tools and processes where there’s an increased cycle of design, build, test, release and monitor. The DevOps market is growing rapidly, that culture is growing rapidly, and within in it we have Kubernetes. 

Looking at service applications what emerged was an optimisation of how applications were built, from services, to very lightweight containers or containerised services. Containers combine an operating system with much lighter service components. Kubernetes is a platform to manage those so you can deploy quickly and orchestrate an increasing number of applications. It’s not necessarily relevant to every single application but Kubernetes has become the de-facto platform for cloud native applications and some of the benefits are faster time-to-market, the ability to scale quicker, and elastic scaling, increasing and decreasing the capacity, improving your availability, optimise the underlying IT cost through digital transformation and support a migration to cloud and enable multi-cloud flexibility.

Kubernetes is a capability that can help organisations address the hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud reality.

Hybrid-cloud Scalability

80% of organisation data is unstructured and those organisations are struggling with that explosion of data growth so they want to accelerate their analytics, automate machine learning pipelines, apply data governance, facilitate audits and regulatory compliance, and ultimately optimise cost because so much of that data may be redundant obsolete or trivial, or it could be accessed infrequently and moved to colder cheaper storage.

We collaborate with 5 agile teams distributed across 9 global sites, applying scaled agile framework (SAFe) principles to the project. Development, devops and test resources deliver fortnightly releases, from a shared code base, against a product roadmap. We combine industry best-practice and Anaeko’s Practical Agile methodology to ensure predictable, stable, releases. To date, we have successfully delivered 40 sprints and enabled 6 major releases of a global product.

One example project is a hybrid-cloud product that scans on-premise and cloud storage environments at massive scale, with an agile distributed team, that needs to cope and deliver on an advertised schedule. Kubernetes fits in where the application itself has been designed from the start as a micro-service so our architecture consists of a number of components that are deployed as docker containers and Kubernetes is used to manage the containers within the system from development to test.

Kubernetes allows developers to focus more on the the functionality of the product without the need to worry so much about deployment, so although we were on a fixed release cycle it allows us to develop more features within each release maintaining scalability and availability. The product was developed with Kubernetes in mind but the initial version of the deployment was deployed effectively as a virtual machine which meant that only vertical scaling was possible. Deployment into Kubernetes meant we had the option to scale horizontally. 

Anaeko Kubernetes Interoperability Service makes things work at scale, optimising Kubernetes and digital transformation from on-premise to hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud for companies and organisations implementing cloud best-fit. We’ve developed tools and techniques with mixed skills teams. Contact us for more information around our Kubernetes and digital transformation services: here