A look back on EPITA’s Summer 2012 Project for Research & Innovation from Jigar Thakkar (SFR Cloud Team):
1. Introduce yourself.
I’m an IT engineer in India, studied 4years (bac +4), in EPITA I’m majoring in Software Engineering. I also work as a Software Developer in India. In this project I work on the technical side, which is mainly software architecture and development.
2. Which company do you work for? What is your project about, can you describe it? (topic, goals, etc.)
SFR is about to launch a Cloud Computing service, and we are developing a tool to help them evaluating how much they should charge each client, according to their needs: the amount of data they are going to require.
3. How much time do you have to realize this project?
We don’t have a real ETA, since our project has a few steps that can be added, but we have two weeks left in a 1month and a half project.
4. How is your team organized? Who is working on what?
Our team is composed of five members, I’m working on the development and the architecture with two of them and two other members are making the interface, the design and the user’s guide.
5. What do you like the most about this working experience?
What I like the most about this project is that it’s a global project. We have to deal with all the faces of this project and its development. The project was brought to us with only textual information : when it was processed, we had to work from scratch.
6. Did you develop any specific skill (personal, work-related, etc.) during this project? What have you gained/acquired during this project both professionally and humanely?
Firstly I had to improve my programing and database creation skills, but what took the most effort and time was to choose which framework to use to develop the project. We finally decided to work with Struts Framework, after 20days of learning and adaptation.
7. How has the PRI enriched your academic experience at EPITA?
Working from scratch, know more about tech. architecture, that’s a good addition to what we learn in Epita. Besides, I feel like we learn a bit better this way, and more importantly: we learn more. We had to improve our skills on topics we are going to use in the future, it makes it a great experience.
8. What impact (if any) does the PRI have on your professional path/orientation?
It’s a project for SFR, that is going to be used by thousands of people, so it’s a really good experience. Since we had to work on all the aspects of this project, not only development, I can now reach the level needed to be a project manager more quickly. So not only it confirmed my orientation but it was really helpful.
