I arrived at Airsource twelve weeks ago to begin my summer internship, and now -- sadly -- it is at an end. It has been an interesting time, where I have learnt a lot and contributed something I feel will be lasting.

The main area of work with which I've been involved has been quality control; aids to test, debug and auto-build Airsource's projects. This has been an education for me in the process of software development, where tracking down bugs can be tedious and time consuming, so catching problems early is important. Automated testing is a wonderful tool for finding bugs in your code (usually when you write the test!), but more so making sure your code doesn't regress as time passes and new code is added. Now, at the end of my internship, seeing the auto-testing framework I implemented in action and catching bugs on a full Airsource project gives a wonderful sense of achievement.

As Airsource is a mobile software company I got to write mobile applications too; one a debugging aid and another for a client. Not only did this teach me the S60 and BREW platforms, on-device debugging and about memory management, but it also showed me how versatile mobile phones are these days.

The work has been challenging, and there was a very steep learning curve at the beginning; but from my first day my colleagues have been have been great at getting me up to speed with programming languages and concepts. During my time here I've learnt two C++ dialects for mobile phones, and learnt Python from scratch. As a result of this my understanding of topics such as OOP has improved immensely.

One of the things I didn't expect to like when I first heard about it were code reviews. But code reviews have turned out to be one of the best things about this summer (I kid you not). It can be hard having your hours of labour being picked apart, but you learn, the reviewer learns and the product becomes better because of it. Code reviews are one of the main reasons why I have improved as a programmer this summer, and I would recommend all companies do them.

It has been a most enjoyable summer here at Airsource, and yes I would do this again!