Discover her journey and go behind the scenes of customer applications development at ActiveViam.
Could you tell us a few words to introduce yourself?
I’m a software developer at ActiveViam in the Cloud team, which is in charge of retail customers projects. I studied at ENSIMAG,the graduate national school for computing and advanced mathematics of Grenoble. I had a first work experience as an intern in an IT consultancy firm, which allowed me to figure out what I really wanted to do and what was less appealing to me. Following this experience, I decided to work at ActiveViam.
Why did you chose ActiveViam?
As a BI consultant, I developed a strong taste for customer contact, further to my already extensive interest in the world of data, nurtured during my studies. We worked for big leading companies and used data management tools, ETLs, and reporting tools. However, the job didn’t offer as much advanced development and optimization-related tasks as I would have liked . When a recruiter contacted me and introduced ActiveViam to me, I realized that their job offer fully matched my expectations: interactions with customers, understanding business needs, while still having a high proportion of development: we work on a proprietary software technology and contribute to improving it everyday.
The diversity of missions allows us not to get bored. Working for a reasonably sized company was also very important to me – I really appreciated it during my internship and wanted to find a similar atmosphere.
How were your first months at ActiveViam?
They mostly begun with many trainings on a variety of ActiveViam tools and softwares! It was quite intense, but it allowed me to start from a solid foundation, before rapidly getting at the heart of the matter. The team, which is young, dynamic and friendly, welcomed me very well. My first mission was to work on the “accelerator” of the product itself, and thus, to work on a functionality which was going to benefit the entire team – which was very gratifying.
Could you tell us about a major experience you had at ActiveViam?
In fact it is still ongoing. After developing functionalities of the “accelerator”, I was assigned a first customer project which was nearly finalized, which was interesting to fully understand projects architecture. Shortly after, I was offered to work on a new major project from scratch, which seemed thrilling: the one of Intermarché, the 3rd biggest retailer in France. I have been working on it for the last 2 months – it is way too soon to talk about every aspect of it, but it is passionating to have the opportunity to start from this early step, to prepare the data, define what is going to be useful to the project, communicate with the customers’ teams to see what we keep from the PoC, what we will need to improve, start developing.
The team is very professional, all is going very well. As an entry-level employee, I have the chance to gain a significant experience, managing a project from scratch. My manager also allowed me to participate in the recruitment process of the person I’m going to work in tandem with for this project.
What is expected of a customer projects developer at ActiveViam?
First of all, you are expected to have a strong knowledge of algorithms, since developing takes a big portion of our time. Then, I would say the will to learn: you are progressively trained on various areas, because as full stack developers, you conceive applications while having to master all aspects of them, rather than focus on a specific part such as the server or UI. You also need to like interacting with customers, because our apps are always developed with the agile method, with a meeting with customers once a week, you need to demonstrate good communication capabilities.
Why do you feel good at ActiveViam?
We feel trusted from the start. As a junior, if you are motivated, you can quickly take on more responsibilities, work on tasks with high added value. Besides, what makes us feel good is the atmosphere: the company is relatively young, everyone is willing to be helpful and support each other. People are here because they really want to, which contributes to the great work climate.