We are asked by several students who wanted to become apprentices in the Cool Summer Internship program what they are going to do at 4PSA. The simple answer is – we do not know exactly, but we can give you a list of possible assignments.

What We Do @ 4PSA

There is some confusion about what we are doing daily, and this is somehow generated by the information available on our website. While VoipNow is our most popular product, it is unlikely that you will do anything related to this product. 4PSA is working on lots of things, like:

• Internal projects that optimize and automate processes – for example we work to automate the software quality assurance in order to perform SQA faster and more reliable.
• Research on technologies that will be used by commercial products, like: distributed databases, cloud provisioning and distribution, high performance JavaScript, load and service distribution.
• Enabler software for our cloud infrastructure and services
• Performance and reliability profiling at OS context and in distributed environments
• Last, but most important, 4PSA is working on a game changer product that will dramatically improve the way how people communicate/work/have fun using the infinite cloud resources.

How You Will Work @4PSA

We do not know exactly what you are going to do, simply because we integrate internship students in real teams. They will get real assignments based on their skills, progress and talent. Students can fully contribute and innovate. They can come with ideas and even architect their own tasks. Each student will have a mentor who will supervise his job.
Another approach would be to create teams of students. While this might look nice, in practice it is very inefficient and does not help students learn much. As a student, you have already done some home projects in teams with your colleagues, so you most likely know what to expect. You do not need to join us to repeat the experience. Of course, it would have been easier for us, but not very useful for apprentices. The five positions we offer are:

• Web Developer (PHP, JavaScript) – If you apply for this position, then you are passionate about serious web technologies. You might get different assignments, from UI oriented tasks, extreme JavaScript OOP programming, HTML 5, to more low level programming in PHP that involves distributed databases, messaging queues like AMQP, distributed tasks, information processing, service provisioning, web authentication and authorization, web services etc. You should apply for this position no matter what is your interest in web technologies; we can find a place for you. We highly recommend you to apply on this internship!
• Software Quality Assurance Engineer – As you probably know, the SQA is an important process of the software development. While it does not involve so much programming, it is a common misconception that no programming skills are required. In fact, your ability to create automated tests will save a lot of time and effort. SQA often requires a lot of imagination. Many times, developers see only a couple of scenarios and implement something to take care of everything. As an SQA engineer, you will have to see more than the obvious.
• Marketing Representative, cloud technologies – We know that not everyone who will graduate with a technical background will end up doing software development. Quite many people want to actually spread worldwide the message from talented developers. You will be able to learn how to do this, while maximizing your existing technical knowledge. In the same time, you will learn a lot about the ecosystem and cloud technologies.
• Junior Security and Performance Engineer – You will act as a Linux hacker, testing the performance of software, provisioning services and investigating known security patterns. You have to know programming and scripting should not be a mystery 🙂 Also, you must be proficient with the Linux OS and the most popular Open Source software.
• C/C++ Developer, Cloud technologies – This year it is the most demanded internship program. Once again, it is hard to predict what you will do exactly, but we can guarantee that will be interesting. It involves programming under Linux – you can develop modules for existing servers or even develop a specific server or library on your own. It will be challenging.

What We Will Do Next
First, we want to thank you for the numerous solutions sent to the first and second problem. Everyone with a qualifying score has been already contacted and scheduled for on-site interviews.

Secondly, on May 17 we will publish three new problems. One will be targeted to web developers, one to marketing aspirants, and the last one to SQA/Junior Security and Performance engineers. Of course, you will have to solve only one of them based on what you want to do @ 4PSA.
Also, starting with next week, we will start to contact everyone who had an on-site interview to tell each one if she/he was accepted in the Cool Summer Internship. 4PSA’s HR maintains a strict policy; we will call everyone to transmit the message personally. We will email you only if five attempts are unsuccessful.

Even if you were not accepted, we want to thank you for your time and effort and we want to let you know that a small present from 4PSA is waiting for you. We will announce at the end of the month what it is and how you can pick it up; maybe we will find a way to save you a trip to our offices. 🙂
And remember, if you have questions you can always email or call us.