Exchange in Leeuwarden

At work, I was assigned to reimagine the homepage of Sicht Data, which was a daunting task since UI/UX design isn’t exactly my strong suit. Fortunately, I wasn’t starting from scratch. There was already a rough design direction, and my coworker Senne provided valuable feedback and guidance, which helped a lot. The real challenge came when I had to implement a read-notification counter. Normally, it wouldn’t be too complicated if I were coding it from scratch, but working within the constraints of Wem’s pre-existing component blocks made things trickier. Still, I managed to get it working, and I’m happy with the current state of the homepage. On my days off, I went to watch a match between SC Cambuur-Leeuwarden and MVV Maastricht. It was a low-key game, decided in the 10th minute when SC Cambuur’s striker Tony Rölke placed a shot into the far corner of the Maastricht goal from close range. Both teams played solid football afterward, but there weren’t many clear-cut chances. The game end...

Week 4 began with a performance review. Our Scrum Master Daan was positively surprised by the progress of my project and gave me some new tasks for the week. My main task was to create a new section in our meetings to handle tasks/actions that could be forwarded to other users and linked to different meetings. I managed to get everything working, although I’m still waiting to hear if the results match expectations. This week wasn’t a typical one, because on Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a conference focused on openEHR and its implementation within Wem. The seminar lasted the whole day and was interesting. It's always rewarding to get a better understanding of how things work behind the scenes. Since openEHR standards are widely used in Finland, it was great to hear that other parts of Europe are beginning to adopt them as well. The event was held at a training center owned by Maarsingh & van Steijn, located in the peaceful Dutch countryside. After the seminar ended,...

As you might have guessed from the title, another week has passed. Monday was a rest day, as I previously mentioned. During that day, I washed clothes and rested in preparation for an intense work week ahead. The week went by extremely fast. I was hard at work with the meeting logger and made significant leaps of progress, getting through most of the sprint’s work during my three days of work. Now, the application has working features like the ability to create, read, update, and delete meetings and decisions. As King's Day was fast approaching, the team had some urgent fixes to make to the main part of Sicht Data. That meant my work for the week was done. I had gotten to the next step of the meeting logging application way ahead of schedule, thanks to already having a rough idea of the requirements beforehand. The next part of the logging page involved assimilating a part of their pre-existing data model, which required a much more thorough look before I could start, something tha...

  This week started off with a lot of training. I completed a couple of the larger WEM medior module training courses before finally, on Wednesday afternoon, I got my first actual assignment. For the next couple of weeks, I will be working on a meeting logging application. I got started on making the application prototype and the required documentation for it , e.g., a design document, a flowchart for the data model, and so on. Fun fact the Oldehove leans more than the iconic tower of Pisa During the week, I also got to see some local sights, like the Oldehove, a leaning and unfinished church in downtown Leeuwarden. On Thursday, Mr. van Leersum came to visit us, and we talked about our experience here so far. He also helped me buy tickets for the next SC Heerenveen match that’s happening this weekend. Friday was a day off from work, and the Easter holidays also began. I spent Friday going to the movies with Arttu and Riku. As I mentioned before, I bought tickets for the football ...

So now a little time has passed. My first week of work has been completed.  Maarsingh en van Steijn is a psychology company and I'm working with their software development department. For the first week I have been just learning about their development environment called wem.io Wem is a no/lowcode visual scripting tool that has been designed for companies to streamline the development of new software. Learning Wem has been both challenging and rewarding. I still have much to learn but I'm getting the hang of things. As of now I have completed the Junior course of Wem and will start working with the team on their big project: Sicht Data.  Here are some pictures of the results from the training program. Outside of work I haven't had time to do much else. As my day starts at around 8 and ends around 18.20-19 (trips included). Only on Thursday I went out with the team to celebrate a week well done. I got to experience a little bit of the local culture and see the sights with th...

 Hello all. Today is the end off the first full day in Holland. I'd like to recap what has happened in the last two days. So yesterday I arrived at the airport with my parents. I met up with my friends who are traveling with me Arttu and Riku. Before boarding we went to eat at Burger King. After that our flight departed at around 16. The flight was relatively short at just over 2 hours. After landing we got our bags and headed deeper into the airport. Our first mission was to find some food. After enriching our culinary world view with hot dogs we hopped on a train to Leeuwarden. The trip was around 2.5 hours. When we arrived at the train station our exchange contact Mr van Leersum was there waiting for us.  At this point I was dead tired and the clock was nearing midnight. The accommodation was a short 20 minute drive away. The house is a small cabin inside of a vacation park.  Today we woke up at about 10. Mr van Leersum took us to the local Aldi to buy groceries and th...