Nexedi Traineeship Q&A

What was your topic?

My project was to tranform the webrunner, a "simple" web service providing the functionnality of a slapos Master (the "brain" of Nexedi's cloud solution) into a full PAAS solution. My work consisted into adding features by developments or via the addition of services. The funniest part was to make a new feature work by setuping new services, and then automatate their deployment. To mention a few of the things I brought to the webrunner : resiliency, extendable monitoring interface, logging in once for accessing all the services, full web shell, webdav access, solving bugs and making the webrunner more stable.

What did you like the most?

What I liked about my traineeship was that I could improve my skills in a lot of different topics : system administration, development, web (both backend and frontend), cloud computing, ...

Any important skill we taught you for being an engineer

I learned to be rigorous. If not, you make people loose their time, or think you're stupid. That's especially more important in Nexedi when one needs to talk with people working in foreign offices : if you're not clear, they will have to guess what you say, and then think about your problem.

What did you teach us?

Answering this question would be too much narcissistic in my opinion.

What contributions did you make to Nexedi projects?

As I said, I worked on a PAAS solution, which is the standard and recommended way of deploying an ERP5, the main product of Nexedi. I added or extended the following features

• Resiliency
• Extendable monitoring interface
• One time logging to access all services
• Full web shell
• Webdav access

So even if I didn't contribute to any project, my work is used in all of them on a daily basis.

Anything you liked especially about Nexedi?

About Nexedi, I really liked the general atmosphere. Everybody knows and respects each other. Everybody has different backgrounds and different skills, so there's plenty of things to learn from each other, even for subjecs not related to computing. It was also common to do afterworks ( in bars and restaurants) and talk friendly about virtually anything.

Anything you liked about the city you stayed in?

As a beer and food lover, Lille was a perfect city for me !

Epilogue

PS : for the story, Nicolas liked so much Nexedi that he came back 2 years later as a full-time employee, after finishing his studies.