About me

My name is Viktor Baert, I studied software development at Vives Kortrijk but gained most of my knowledge from side projects, as software development is also a major hobby of mine.
I started my internship at TVH in March 2018 and finished it later in June.

Why I chose TVH

I have 2 reasons why I applied for an internship at TVH. The first one is my sister who was Marketing Manager at TVH Brisbane at the time. When she talked about TVH it was always with happiness and satisfaction. She also told me that TVH had quite a large IT department and that general management is also really investing in IT and modern technologies.

The second reason is a more visual one, I knew TVH before my sister started working for the company because of the billboards visible from the highway. They were creative, open minded and everytime I passed TVH on the highway I would always look at the building to see if there was a new one. I was always interested in what it was like to work there when I saw one of those billboards.

The assignment

I had the liberty of choosing between several interesting topics, after much consideration I finally chose the topic “Investigate Mendix & Firebase for rapid application development”. Firebase is a (M)BaaS provider from Google while Mendix is a complete development environment with the focus on visual programming or programming with blocks as I like to call it.

To aid me in the investigation, I was asked to develop a meal order application with both platforms that in theory could replace the current one used at TVH.

The applications were developed with both platforms to explore these platforms and see how much they would help the development process.

In the case of Mendix it was concluded that the platform had value in some aspects but not enough to trigger a software development transformation.

As for Firebase it’s certainly an interesting platform and shares some of its products with the Google Cloud Platform which we at TVH actively use. While Firebase doesn’t target big enterprises as the main audience, it is certainly a good idea to keep track of the evolution of the platform and see how it evolves together with the Google Cloud Platform.

Besides the assignment it was also exciting to learn about how TVH IT operates, which technologies are used and the huge scale they operate at.

The mentors

I (right on photo) believe that I was a title contender for the most spoiled intern at any company as I had not one but two amazing mentors: Marjan Callewaert (Chapter Lead Java) & Patrick Vansevenant (R&D Engineer). Marjan guided me in the general process and made sure I got from A to B with good result. Patrick (left on photo) guided me in the development process, he always guided me with the right approach whenever I had doubts. These two combined with everyone from IT are a big reason why my internship was successful as everyone I spoke to was very willing to help me where they could.

Company Culture

While working on my assignment I’ve seen many things going on in TVH. It seemed like there was always something planned to do for anyone. There’s a lot of exercise events planned from cycling to snowboarding and everything in between. But there are also socially focused events and gatherings like TVH Kaffee where the whole company is invited for a few drinks in the events room visible from the highway.

The journey continues

I really enjoyed my time as an intern in TVH and I’m really grateful that I was offered a position as I can continue to work with and learn from the amazing people that I can now call colleagues. So my advice to all students is that TVH should definitely be on your list if you’re currently looking for an IT internship. You won’t regret your choice.

By: Viktor Baert, R&D Engineer