For my final placement I worked alongside the Vodafone Management Team (VMT) who oversaw the European Network Testing (lab) Service (ENTS). This placement gave me a good amount of experience working alongside a third party, Capgemini. While Capgemini are responsible for much of the day-to-day operation of the physical lab locations, Vodafone provided the oversight and governance ensuring that KPIs and SLAs were met to provide the best service for our service users. My first project within the team was to update and reimplement our information portal using the Microsoft Sharepoint suite of tools. As part of this, I was tasked with merging our existing document share with the previously separate portal, ensuring that permissions and access was respected to prevent potential security issues. On completion of the portal, it was merged with the department EMBRACE initiative - a site created to consolidate information and access to all relevant parts of Networking chapter of the company. Alongside this launch, I presented the new portal in the Networking management meeting alongside my peers - a great opportunity to further work on my presentational skills. Before departing this role, I was given the opportunity to take charge of a security related task to audit all files in the team’s document store. This store contained well over 30,000 files and would have taken weeks to manually flag and alter each file. By using a combination of Power Automate as well as PowerShell scripting, I was able to reduce the process down to a matter of hours, and subsequently minutes providing a robust and comprehensive solution which would allow ongoing audits to be completed as files are actively added to the document store. On completion of this functionality, I was also responsible for creating comprehensive, standardised documentation which explains use, technical reasoning and troubleshooting. I also guided handover sessions to ensure functionality and maintenance can be carried out by colleagues.

While working within the ENTS team I was invited to participate in Vodafone Hackalympics. This was an internal Hackathon focused on the fields of Simplicity, Growth and Customer. Our team decided on a project in the Simplicity category - focusing on the developer onboarding experience within Vodafone. The primary goal was to consolidate knowledge sharing and standardise the golden path new engineers would take in order to reduce the onboarding time and create meaningful contributions quicker. In terms of technologies, we used a mixture of Backstage, InnerSource Project Portal for project discovery, and Azure AI for information retrieval. We were runners up in the first round however won the semi-final stage.

On my second placement, I entered a research role as part of the Future Tech and Innovation team. During this placement I decided to investigate how Vodafone may benefit from migrating from the React framework to a quickly maturing framework known as Svelte. As part of this research I investigated performance improvements as well as the feature set of the framework - producing many code examples demonstrating these (including the 7GUI benchmark to demonstrate ease of development versus the React equivalent). In order to keep many of the code examples in a cohesive, accessible format these were integrated into a platform utilising SvelteKit with the UI demonstrating how Vodafones SourceWeb could be adapted to create reusable, compact components to ensure consistency across products. As well as producing a research document, I also presented my findings to colleagues as part of a Knowledge Sharing session which allowed me to improve my public speaking skills.

I joined the Vodafone graduate scheme in September of 2022, my first placement being part of the SMP (Software Module Programming) team working on the Ultrahub project. While working on this team I was able to gain experience and proficiency in technologies and platforms such as: - AWS - Kubernetes - Github Actions - React - Terraform - Jenkins