Hi, my name is Sven. I am from Germany and currently an intern at Evolux. This text is in English, because although I can (more or less) communicate in Portuguese by now, it is still far away from acceptable in a written form, and I don’t want to bother you with a text laden with mistakes. 

I have started working at Evolux in the beginning of February, and I will stay for six months. My internship is organized by a global student organisation called “AIESEC”, which aims to help people to find internships all over the world. When I arrived at the office on my first day, I had this classic “Wow!”-moment. The house I entered was not an ugly office place, but a nice house that looks at lot like you would want to live there (and, yes, there also is a pool!). The same goes for the people at Evolux. They made me feel at home from the first day on, included me in both work and other activities and did a great job of helping me to settle in. 

I work with the development team, that creates new product features, fixes bug (and also creates all of them), and basically stares at a screen all day. But it’s not as boring as it may sound. Of course you have to like the whole software development thing a bit, but if you do, I think this is a pretty great job. My particular work involves a lot of Python programming and trying to understand the wonderfully/horribly twisted telephony applications FreeSWITCH and Asterisk. I have worked with Python before, but not to the extend I’m doing it here, and the field of telephony is basically completely new for me. Python and FreeSWITCH/Asterisk are two good examples for a very different kind of learning experience: If you have programmed before with a different language and starting Python, it feels like you are coming out of the woods, you are leaving the dark and you are suddenly standing on a beautiful field with flowers. Everything is easier and you wonder why these things ever had to be difficult (although you will also run into the pitfalls of this simplicity every once in a while). If all you know about telephony is picking up the phone and dialing a number, or maybe configuring your VoIP router at home, starting with FreeSWITCH or Asterisk is like standing on a field with beautiful flowers and suddenly falling into a cave with a gigantic maze of roots, telephone wires, IP packages and street signs that all point in different directions. So,… the work is interesting and challenging. But that is not what makes it great in the first place. The most important part is something else: I really like going to work. I wake up in the morning, and I’m looking forward to being at the office. Because there, I’m surrounded by cool people. People that like what they do, that are passionate about it. People that have more in common than just the same job. They are friends. They not only work together, but also willingly stay later after work to drink a beer together, figure out some problem or just talk. They sometimes have dinner together, spend time drinking coffee, and play games on the playstation.  Of course the actual work is the largest part of the day, but it’s the small things that also matter, and that make the overall experience what it is. To wrap this up, after the first month, I can say that my experience here at Evolux and in Brazil in general is an incredible one, something everyone who has the opportunity should do in their life. And as you probably know by now, I think Evolux is a great place for this internship. I hope I will be able to say the same thing at the end of my six months. But then, it will be in Portuguese. More of my experience here: http://sven.gobigemma.com/work/

After the first month I believe I now have managed navigate the main roads of the maze in the telephony cave, while I tripped and fell a couple of times over hidden rocks on the Python flower-field. There is still much work to do to get on top of both topics, but I think I am on a good way to get good things out of these two worlds. But enough with the word-pictures for now, let’s get real again.