Summer Internship Journals: Nazeli and Shahen Hagen '17 at Jackpine Technologies

In the past seven weeks, I have learned more than I ever thought possible. I came into this internship thinking I knew something about Computer Science; turns out I knew about only the basics, the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to CS and software development than meets the eye; knowing the syntax and speaking the language is only the beginning.

In the past few weeks, I have been able to actually start writing my own code. When building a deployment in CONS3RT, you have the option to add a test to your build, essentially giving users the option to run different scans on the code in their software assets. My job was to add Sonar to the mix of test tools offered. Sonar is the free software Jackpine actually uses to scan their code, so they thought it would be beneficial to offer the same software to their customers. In order to integrate this test tool into the CONS3RT service, I had to write a program to install the software needed, run the scan, and store the resulting report in a specified location. Having no idea how to do any of this, I based my code off of similar code for other test tools and was able to get a basic structure and outline for my code. Because I was able to look at and analyze current code, I was able to learn a lot about the structure of the code and how to make my own version of it.

After finishing my internship at Jackpine Technologies, it is evident that my knowledge of marketing has grown immensely. After working on the technical side of Jackpine for the first half of my internship, I was relieved to finally move on to more business-focused tasks. The seemingly unrelated training in Cons3rt, Jackpine’s most popular project, and in-depth learning about the technological side of Jackpine in the first part of my internship gave me the tools I needed to take on more advanced marketing assignments. For example, in the second part of my internship I worked on Jackpine’s marketing strategy and researched its competitors.

Throughout my final month with Jackpine, I developed their marketing strategy for the coming months. My first task was to find advertising opportunities that would successfully introduce the company and its products to prospective users. First, I researched advertising in Silicon Valley. This tech hub offers an abundance of customers who could use and integrate Jackpine products into their businesses. I found that subway ads in Silicon Valley have proven to be very effective and fairly inexpensive. Furthermore, I pursued sponsoring episodes of DevOps podcasts. The DevOps community is a huge group that could offer Jackpine many possible users. Podcasts are popular among the DevOps community and offer affordable sponsorships for episodes that can get up to 150,000 downloads. Second, I worked on finding DevOps conventions that Jackpine could buy a booth at to expand their client base. This environment would allow Jackpine to demo for prospective clients from all around the US at a fairly inexpensive cost. Lastly, I worked to find companies that Jackpine could partner with. Many companies could use Jackpine’s superior security, and in return Jackpine could use help storing their code, for example. I talked to Docker, a company that compartmentalizes code, about a partnership where Jackpine uses their storage component and in return Docker can utilize Jackpine’s superior security. Finally, I learned the importance of streamlining communication between the marketing team and the developers on the technological side. Jackpine wants to drive users to their website once they come out with a bigger release. It would be a waste to use up their marketing budget and drive users to a website without a new feature to show them.