Engineering Team Internship Program Launched!
Boomtown participates with Advanced Technology International (ATI) - the South Carolina Department of Commerce (SC Commerce) Office of Innovation 2022 Relentless Challenge grant recipient in “Expanding SC Underrepresented Minorities in the Cyber Security and Computer Science Workforce.” The program’s mission is to introduce underrepresented minority students from SC historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) & Trident Technical College (TTC) to the opportunities presented by the cyber security and computer science profession, increase their representation in the field, and create a pipeline of talent that benefits both job seekers and employers.
Director of Engineering at BoomTown, Nick Garcia has served as a mentor to rising senior Delvin Peterson from SC HBCU Allen University in Columbia, SC since March 2022. During internship week, Delvin got to spend some time with the Blue Barracudas (on the BoomTown Dev Team) to see what a week in the life of an engineer is like & also experience all that BoomTown has to offer. Pictured above, Delvin, Nick & Jason Finneyfrock, Director of Software Architecture enjoy a final beautiful Charleston day laid back lunch n’ learn about how they became interested in tech & what kinds of code languages would be a good idea to learn if he is interested in jumping aboard the BoomTown team. Big shout out thanks to everyone who helped make Delvin feel at home!
And this is just ONE of the internship projects Nick has been working on over the past year and a half. In fact, he is launching a BoomTown Dev Team Internship Program beginning this summer, “We will have two rising seniors & one rising junior (from Western Governors University, University of South Carolina Aiken & Charleston Southern University) One is already a BoomTown Client Concierge who has been studying CS. They will all be remote working with the RC, Mythical Features, and Blue Barracudas teams throughout the summer (2-3 months) on product features, bugs, and tech debt. Long term we hope to continue this program and potentially expand to additional interns.”
According to the Intern Position description these folks will have the opportunity to “create & lead a specified initiative, respond to customer feedback, research latest software and industry trends. They will work closely with a cross-functional Agile development team to build and improve products & features for BoomTown's software platform. As a part of this team, they will be responsible for the lifecycle of products from technical designs, to implementation, testing, documentation, delivery, & maintenance. This will include contributing to small bug fixes, feature work, & unit tests with the help of the team. In addition there will be daily participation in agile ceremonies, PR reviews, code reviews & familiarization with Boomtown agile process, products & code base. Platform test features will also be learned. Preferred Qualifications for the position: Rising Junior or Senior pursuing a degree in Computer Science or related technical field Experience with at least one Object Oriented Programming language Experience writing/consuming RESTful APIs Ability to walk through working code examples from a repository like GitHub Experience with C# and .Net Core Experience with at least one database technology Knowledge of Agile development methodologies, & experience with cloud computing such as Amazon Web Services BoomTown is an equal opportunity employer”.
This program has been a long time coming as Charleston tech companies at the scaling stage of growth like BoomTown have had a hard time finding the needed bandwidth to successfully engage interns from the community & now because of the work Nick has put into creating a curriculum & management strategy, our teams & interns will Create an Amazing Experience that will provide a robust workforce development program for BoomTown. Way to go Nick!
