Back in February, we were joined by Will Beese, a student from SGS College in Filton, Bristol who came to Cubik to do a week of work experience. Will was a fantastic addition to the office and scored tops mark from the team for bringing in cakes and biscuits on his first day.

Whilst at Cubik, Will kept a diary of the different activities he got involved with and what he learned. Find out what Will got up to below:

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Day One

‍On my first day of work experience with Cubik, I started the day with Camilla Saunders (Business Manager) who explained a bit about her role.

Camilla explained her responsibilities which include handling Cubik’s finances and human resources departments for the business and explained what she does to look after her staff in the Business Department. I then got to sit in on the Monday Morning Meeting, where the team discuss the progress of every live project. It was interesting, talking through all the ongoing projects and which customers they were meeting through the week. After the meeting, I was back working with Camilla and spent the morning handling invoices.

In the afternoon, I spent some time with Matthew Weatherburn (Senior Project Manager) and Dan Ford (Project Manager) in the Project Management team. I got to see how they operate and how the business organises all the projects into various files. There are so many different files and if a document is misplaced it could take quite a while to find, so it was interesting to see how that is managed. Paul Mullen (Managing Director) then took me through the networking system of the business and all the back-ups for the back-ups (for the back-ups!) to keep their business safe from cyber-attacks. At the end of the day, I spent a bit of time with Jake Mullen fixing issues that any of the machines where having that might leave them vulnerable.

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Day Two

‍I spent my second day of work experience with the Production Team. They took me through how they look to trouble shoot their circuit boards and I then got to trouble shoot some simple ones myself. I really enjoyed doing this as it was very interesting. Even though the boards are often not very big trouble shooting can be immensely complicated, especially if there is a problem. I was then given an old, small circuit board and a few different components. I used a soldering iron to solder the components onto the circuit board. I really enjoyed doing this as I have not had the opportunity to do anything like that before. It was challenging at times, but I enjoyed the challenge. I was pleased that it was an old board because that meant if I messed anything up it would not affect an ongoing project and create more work for someone else.

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Day Three

‍On my third day I spent the day with Paul preparing some of the old machines that had been collected to be redistributed to other countries’ schools. We had to go through all the computers completely clear all the hard drives. Some of the computers we had to physically open to find out why there not working or add a graphics card. I do not have a lot of experience when it comes to the inside of computers, so I found this very interesting and I enjoyed doing this.

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Day Four

‍On my fourth day, I was with Will Goodman (Software Engineer) experimenting with embedded C. I had only used C# before, so it was good to get experience in a coding language that I’ve not used much before. I had to use the code to program a small business card game. On the game, there is a circle of lights and you must press the button on the card to stop it on the top green light. I was taught how it worked and then had to experiment with it. I did make the game almost impossible by the 4 level!

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Day 5

‍On my final day, I spent most of my time with Callum Young (Placement Engineer) learning about Raspberry Pi. I found this particularly interesting because I did not realise that you could get something that small with the capabilities of a computer. Obviously, it is not as powerful, but I was impressed by how much you could do with it. We did several different things with the Raspberry Pi including taking an LED board and making it do various patterns. For the rest of the day, I was given the Raspberry Pi and asked to see what I could do with it. I experimented with making it run a few different things which was good fun!

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Overall, I loved my week at Cubik Innovation! I was made really welcome by everyone and was really interested and impressed by the work they do.

To everyone at Cubik, thank you for having me.

Will