Cylex Summer Internship 2016 - Programming has never been more fun!

Oh, September - your arrival means summer has officially come to an end, with no regard whatsoever for our feelings about its sudden departure. We’ll get over it eventually, but besides the change in weather, for us at Cylex the end of summer also brings an end to our internship program. And boy, was it a terrific one this year :)

Here’s how it all went down:

• May: everything begins somewhere, and our journey began with recruitment interviews and candidate selection. We had such an amazing turnout and the process of choosing only a dozen students was more difficult than we thought. However, we came up with a great group of kids, willing to work on their skills, improve themselves and have some fun in the meantime: after all, they were about to find out how to control a drone (how cool is that?!)

• June: our programmers set it all in motion! A schedule was prepared, where the students would learn every day about what it takes to develop a Javascript app for the controlled flight of a drone. We started reorganising desks, bringing in refreshments and needless to say, we were all really excited to welcome our students and to witness an actual drone in our building!

• July - August: for three weeks, the interns studied and learned, and studied and learned again. They learned to code in Javascript and made a Node.js app that used Socket.IO for real time communication. They tested different devices for controlling the drone, like the Xbox One Controller.  Together with our programmers, they also used image recognition to implement a simple AR (Augmented Reality) application using the drone's camera livestream. Truth be told, their “work day” consisted of 8 hours, but come on, they’ll be the first to admit they had a lot fun during work. We even have the photos to prove it.

 And eventually, the end result was more than satisfying. Look at the drone make its way up!

It took some collective work, it had its ups and downs, but it was more than worthwhile to see all their hard work (and the code they wrote) materialize into a drone control app.

Not to brag, but we had an amazing group of students this summer. We learned so much from one another! There was laughing, there was bonding, it was fun and it was a summer of great results and experiences.

We couldn’t be any prouder of them and their achievements at Cylex!