Alumni features

Sascha - Böblingen, 2002

"Sascha, a student at Hamburg-Harburg Technical, was one of twelve students participating in IBM's Extreme Blue™ internship and contributed to a project developing a Web services infrastructure. Sascha told us about his experiences and impressions during the internship and about how the Extreme Blue program stands out from other internships.

Sascha, can you please describe the Extreme Blue project you worked on?

My team developed a Web Services infrastructure which should be commercially offered to the market after the intern. The idea was to create a base system providing access control and accounting modalities for Web Services. My part was to program a core system which checks the validity of existing licenses and generates offers. Web Services are services which can be found and accessed on the Internet via network messages.

When thinking about the internship - what is your final impression?

I very much liked the fact that before programming we also were asked to design a reasonable concept of the project. We first had to find answers to questions like 'What is reasonable to the market?' This was a new sort of challenge which took us the first couple of weeks to discuss and discard ideas before coming close to the final solution. Then we decided on a strategy and wrote a demonstration application to point out its advantages.

What did you like about the Extreme Blue program?

To experience real teamwork, I believe, was most important to me. Right from the beginning work was clearly assigned and still everybody worked hand in hand. There was no competition among team members - a very positive experience. As a group we were left to develop our solutions absolutely independently. Then again, we met on a regular basis with our mentor - profiting from his experience and tips. In the beginning, targets were rather vague; nobody gave us strict guidelines. As the project we worked on was based upon latest technologies, there was hardly any public information available on it. So we really had the chance to develop something absolutely new right from the beginning.

What was your personal experience? What did you learn for yourself?

How to develop software - at university you usually deal with this in theory. With the Extreme Blue program I could for the first time realize in practice what I had learned in theoretical studies. Now I know that many things really work the way I thought them to. In our project I could especially bring in my Java™ knowledge. But I also learned what mistakes can happen in software development - and how to avoid them. I learned a lot about key technologies like XML, a knowledge which will be helpful for my further studies at university.

Was the Extreme Blue program just an ordinary internship for you?

No! The Extreme Blue program definitely stands out from usual internship. With the Extreme Blue program they gave us a single problem which we had to solve as a team. That was the target. Either we would succeed or not! That claim strongly motivated us. Normally, in an internship you only assist somebody in an existing and ongoing project. With the Extreme Blue program we had the chance to organize our work on our own. The interest in the outcome of our project was very strong, so that we got to talk to a lot of high-level IBM managers and experts whom you normally wouldn't get to know. The highlight surely was the final event in London where we met all the other European Extreme Blue teams. We learned about how other teams had worked and which experiences they had made. And we found some spare time to go out with the other teams - the working atmosphere at IBM sure was excellent!

Questions by Sven M. Kahn.