Hugh's work experience: Developing a planning applications map

The start of my 6 week internship

When I first arrived, I was a bit nervous as I had never done something like this before. Vicky, the Health and Wellbeing Person, very quickly put me at ease with a warm welcome and introduced me to my "buddy" Ben, who took me out for lunch at a cool street place that had really good food. He was telling me about the BOPS project, and how I could contribute by creating a map that could show all planning applications. BOPS is a current Unboxed project with a focus to create a user centred, data driven back-office planning system (BOPS) to help provide a better, simpler and more transparent planning service for councils. I thought working on this planning application map would be a good way to hit the ground running and just aim to make a final product, or a Minimum Viable Product at the very least. The benefit this map could provide would be an example of how visualising open data can be useful for both the general public and developers.

So I first started by looking at how to implement a map onto a website. With having very limited JavaScript knowledge, I searched the internet to do some research into how I could go about this. Ben had recommended looking at a library called leaflet, Leaflet is a JavaScript library for building web mapping applications and helps to enable developers without GIS expertise to display tiled web maps from public servers, so I started by looking to use this.

Once I got the map up and running, the next steps I looked at were: plotting points from data, then making the site use GDS (Government Design System), using the BOPS API to get the data to be plotted. These steps all had their own challenges, which required a calm and calculated approach to fixing, which is a skill I have learned from my time at Unboxed.

Encountering a challenge

One challenge in particular was realising that because I was getting the information in real time from the internet, this would take some time and not arrive instantly. This took a lot of trial and error as a lot of the functions rely on this data being loaded and ready. I overcame this challenge by researching how asynchronous tasks work with JavaScript, yet another aspect of developing that I had no experience with. Eventually, I managed to understand and apply my knowledge of this to make the site function correctly.

I also had a look at the API itself as I was trying to get some information that was stored in it but not currently accessible, which was written in Ruby, a language I had no experience in. It was also interesting to see a product on a much larger scale than I had ever seen before, and how you have to plan development of it in a calculated manner instead of just starting on it. It was also interesting to look into running tests to make sure no commit breaks anything because it was a topic that had been mentioned in my course but I didn't really understand how to apply it.

Helping out with work experience

I also helped Ben with two work experience students that came in for a week. It was a really cool experience that I learned a lot from being on the other side and having someone under my wing. I gave them some tasks to help with my website and they got straight to it. It really made me realise how far I have come from when I started as I remember being in the same position as them just four weeks ago. I even ended up using some of their code in my project!

Design meets development

One aspect I found interesting is how design is incorporated into the development process. Design was something that we had briefly been taught about, but at a very superficial level so it was interesting to see how much work actually goes into the design process and their thought process through the design clubs that were held. The designers would present some aspect about design that they found interesting (it could be anything, for example the AC Milan rebranding) which really changed my perspective on how much thought is actually put into design. There were also dev clubs which were a similar thing, but about more computer-based topics which was also very interesting.

Fitting in at Unboxed

Another aspect I really enjoyed about my time at Unboxed is how easy it was to settle in. Everyone was so friendly to me and made me feel right at home. I really enjoyed the work environment and also the snacks and drinks in the kitchen!

My advice for anyone interested in computer science

One thing I would say to someone who is interested in doing computer science is to make sure that you are truly passionate about computers and computer science, as it is not an easy task and sometimes it will be frustrating. If you truly have a passion for computer science, you will push yourself to try and understand and before you know it you are capable of doing way more than you thought you ever would.