Hi, I am Marc André, intern at Pyxis; or should I say member of the team. I am presently doing an internship in the Studio of Pyxis Technologies in Laval. It has already been a month and half since I started my adventure here and what an adventure it has been until now! What’s Pyxis? It’s a motivated team of funny pranksters, who can also be serious and are always ready to advise. Pyxis, it’s also flexible hours, the possibility of working from home, the Gyro Thursdays, the bike rides, the collaborative wall and the “Champion of the week” trophy! At Pyxis, we also practise Peer Programming, because sometimes two heads are better than one!
Integration at Pyxis has been really easy, the team is dynamic and motivated at work. My internship has started really well : a new project, a new work environment and the role of lead programmer on my project.
Having arrived at the start, I was able to take part to all levels of the development. I have been able to make choices on the technologies to be used, be part of elaborating the architecture as well as conceiving the interface. This level of integration in a team is something I had never experienced before and I have to say it’s really rewarding. I have my say and my opinion is respected on the same level as that of the other members of the team, even considering my obvious lack of experience on the labour market.
I am still working today on the project started more than a month ago and I am still loving the experience. The project management approach for software development that is mainly taught in universities is waterfall management. Other models are quickly mentioned but nothing more. Well, at Pyxis I have had the chance of discovering another approach : Agility!
When working with Agility, we work in one to three weeks sprints/iterations. Each sprint aims at reiterating a new delivery that adds features to the previous version of the software and obtaining at the end a finished and tested version. This approach is much better suited to the needs of the client who can thus give his opinion at the end of the iteration, which allows us to constantly realign the project to answer his needs! It’s more interesting than waterfall development that is more rigid and in which it becomes difficult to adapt the product when well under way.
Working at Pyxis, it’s being Agile. Usually, when you think Pyxis, you think Agility and it shows. From the way of working to products like Urban Turtle, a Scrum project management tool designed and developed here, everything at Pyxis rimes with Agility. In short, if I had to do an internship again, I would certainly come back here… and why not you?
