Sander Verwimp – Life as a Summer Intern 2024 in the Back-end Core Components team

Hello, I’m Sander and I’m 21 years old. I just finished my bachelor’s in Informatics with a minor in Mathematics. Next year I will be starting my master’s degree in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence.

Why did you choose to do a summer internship at Twipe?

At the VTK internship fair in November I was looking for a summer internship to expand my working experience in IT. At the time, I hadn’t heard of Twipe, but the Twipees were welcoming, enthusiastic, and eager to discuss the internship opportunities available at Twipe. From this brief interaction, it immediately became clear to me that Twipe offers an open and supportive work environment with plenty of learning opportunities and room for growth. This is, of course, everything you could wish to get out of an internship. The fact that the company is based in Leuven was a bonus as it made it easy for me, as a student in Leuven, to commute to work.

Which projects did you work on and what stood out?

The goal of my project was to make the life of Twipees a bit easier by expanding the functionality of their internal support bot: “Twippy”. Those new functionalities included sending a push notification to a device and swapping the execution environment of a device between production and testing. To complete this task I first had to implement a couple of API endpoints in a new tools API that would handle all back-end functionality such as database interactions. The second part of this task was to make these new actions available through an easy-to-use command for the Twippy Slack bot.

I don’t think I could have asked for a better internship project. It was a complete project combining both working with an abstract back-end architecture and creating a concrete tool that’s usable by Twipees. This project presented me with lots of educational experiences: from programming in the ASP.NET framework which I had no previous experience with, to deploying an API on AWS.

Although Sander was new to .NET, he quickly created Twippy endpoints, showing strong ownership. Thanks to him, we’re closer to closing Alfred (slackbot).

Tobie Devries

Software Engineer, Twipe

How did you find the vibe at Twipe?

I would describe it as “professional yet informal”. Every Twipee works very hard to deliver the best possible product in the most efficient way. This attitude is also expected from the interns and drives us to reach our potential. However, this doesn’t mean that the atmosphere at Twipe is strict, on the contrary. Twipees are always ready to help interns, even across the different teams. Every day, during lunch, people are playing foosball. And every two weeks at the end of the sprint, a wrap-up is organised with a special lunch on that day. These and lots of other activities make Twipe, in my opinion, a company that everybody would be more than happy to work for.

What is the key thing you learned during your internship?

The key thing I learned is that those theoretical software design patterns I learned at university, in practice really do make for a better and more easily understandable code base, certainly once the scale starts to grow. It does take more effort to apply those patterns rigorously, but during my onboarding, I noticed the key advantage this gives employees. The consistency of the code made it so I could easily find my way into it with only a bit of explanation in the beginning.

This and other experiences were very valuable to me and they will provide a boost to the start of my career.

As an intern, you take on a challenging project with Twipees’ support. By the end, you’ll create something you’re proud of that seemed impossible just weeks before.

Sander Verwimp

Summer Intern 2024, Twipe

Would you recommend Twipe to future interns?

Certainly! Twipe is a great place to work. As an intern, you get a challenging project to work on and Twipees spare no effort to help you and share as much of their practical experience as possible. After the internship, you have made something you can be proud of and you wouldn’t be able to have made it a few weeks earlier. I recommend every student who’s looking for a way to grow their experience in IT to try their luck at an internship at Twipe.

Meet Sander’s class of 2024

Interested in joining Twipe as an intern?