Traineeship at BRYXX results in valuable collaboration

In the final year of their study, IT students find out what it means to work in a professional environment during a traineeship. Frédéricq and Niels look back on their time as trainees at BRYXX. “It’s where we put theory into practice.”

 Frédéricq Stuer and Niels Vissers both studied applied IT at KdG Hogeschool in Antwerp. For two months – during the final year of their study – they were trainees at BRYXX. And because a traineeship is not just about theory, they got a challenging project. They had to combine Oracle WebLogic Server and Kubernetes. In order to create a highly available, highly scalable, fully automated and fully monitored middleware environment.

“From the start it was clear that this project indeed would be a challenge for us”, says Niels. “Both WebLogic and Kubernetes were new to us. During the first two weeks of our traineeship, we took the time to get to know the technology and play around with it.” Frédéricq and Niels had encountered the concepts of microservices and serverless solutions at KdG. “But we didn’t have any experience in working with containers and managing containerized applications with a solution like Kubernetes”, adds Niels.

Put to the test

Frédéricq and Niels first set out to find out whether is is possible to combine WebLogic with Kubernetes and find out the combination’s limits. And more importantly, they wanted to verify whether that combination makes sense to begin with. “It does”, Niels contined. “Well, at least sometimes.” Over the years, BRYXX gained experience with both traditional Java applications and containerized applications. BRYXX assumed that putting together WebLogic and Kubernetes could result in a powerful combination.

“But when something is technically possible, that doesn’t necessarily mean that is useful, too”, Frédéricq said. “That’s the idea we experimented with. We took the idea and put it to the test.” In the process, Frédéricq and Niels studied and compared several tools, and reported a number of key findings.

Freedom and responsibility

Looking back on their traineeship, Frédéricq and Niels consider it a very valuable part of their study. “At KdG, we learned a lot about different concepts, platforms and systems”, Niels explained. “But putting them into practice, is what we did during our traineeship at BRYXX.” Besides being technologically challenging, the traineeship also introduced both students to a real-life, professional working environment. “We promptly liked the informal atmosphere”, Frédéricq said. “Niels and I got the right support whenever we needed it. We had the freedom to approach the project the way we preferred, but also had to take responsibility and come up with results – just like it would be in a real project.”

Working with trainees for two months proved to be valuable to BRYXX as well. The company likes to challenge the trainees, trigger their ambition to deep-dive into a certain technology and encourage a valuable collaboration…

Would you like to join BRYXX as a trainee? Contact us!