Joining Beta Launch
In January of 2020, I was in my third year at SLIIT. We needed to find an Internship at the time. SLIIT offers an Industry Placement module in which we must work for six months before graduating.
Process
I started applying to companies. I had 5–6 interviews with different companies. This process began in January 2020, and I applied to Beta Launch in June. I was selected as an Intern Software Engineer after passing two rounds of interviews. I was a bit nervous at the start as I had only project-level experience in technologies such as Java and Javascript.
First Work
First I was allocated to a web application project. At the start, they mentioned going through Tailwind CSS. About Tailwindcss you can check my previous article -> https://mithelandev.medium.com/tailwindcss-6b44a0b7485c
Deshan was the first Senior person who helped me to learn fundamental things. After a month I was changed to another project called TAKSO. Almost I worked for 1 year and 6 months in TAKSO. Takso is a web application for Australian Culture Services. This application was engineered using ReactJS ,Redux, Semantic UI for frontend , NodeJS for the backend and SQL is used for the database.
Guidance At Beta Launch
Tiran and Kavindu are the seniors who helped me to learn the fundamentals in Javascript. From their guidance from them, I could able to learn the JS and ReactJS. After months, i started to perform well, then i was put on PB (product backlog) board. Since then I was working with PB handling both urgent tickets and client requests. We run a 1-week sprint according to our team members, currently, it is 2 weeks sprint.After 8 months of Internship, in April 2021 , i was promoted to Associate Software Engineer.
From this point, I was able to learn about using Jira and how we should communicate with Clients and their expectations, mainly time management. time management is the key in the IT industry. We used the Fibonacci sequence to estimate tickets. According to the estimate, we have to finish the particular sprint and merge it into the stage.
The stage is the place where the test cases are passed and sent to the QA to test whether the requirement is satisfied. Once all the tickets are done they will be sent to production. In the meanwhile I was started learning about AWS. Beta Launch provided me a Udemy course on AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification.
Agile
The Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by breaking it up into several phases.We have daily Standups where the objective is to review important task that have been completed, are currently being worked on, or are about to be initiated. When we face a blocker while working on a task, we let our colleagues know about them and seek for their help. We have monthly retrospective meetings, product backlog, backlog grooming and sprint reviews.
Culture
Culture is an important factor that every IT professional considers. We have a great culture here, and everyone is glad to help you. We have monthly team meets in order to maintain a strong team.
October and November are months I had my final year research project presentation and research paper release. I have to work at night too to finish both my work and study life. Hopefully with the help of my lecturers, able to publish our research paper in IEEE.
I also want to express my gratitude to Team Takso for their understanding and willingness to let me take a few days off to prepare and work on my research paper.In our one-on-one meeting, Janaka mentioned the idea of tracking the bat’s speed in Cricket. It was the first spark that helped me to do a research on Cricket shot classification mobile app. Idea is find the type and accuracy of the shot based on the user’s input.
You can check our research paper in here : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9671109.
Our project was selected for NBQSA by SLIIT. Then we participated in the competition Sadly not selected in top positions to continue. But yeah we tried out best.I will write another story about the final year project.
Conclusion
Beta Launch has supported me with both my work and studies since 2020. My career in industry began with Beta Launch. I worked on research paper , did all the assignments and exam and graduated while working at Beta Launch. I want to express my gratitude to all of my coworkers for their support so far though.
Thank you :)
