Eucon Group

My first steps into professional software development

After having a few tough months during the pandemic, I decided to try something new (I was in my 4th semester of studying business at the time) and got a software development internship at Eucon.

The Company

Eucon does data and claim management for large insurance companies, mainly in the automotive sector, real estate, and other areas.

Eucon was my first professional job in the software development world.

My internship

My internship had a span of 2 months.

1. Month: Software Development

During this time I worked for one month in a software development team focused on data extraction from documents.

The team was incredibly supportive! Especially one of the senior developers helped me a lot by starting a few hour-long pair programming sessions with me in my 2nd week.

I instantly got assigned some tickets that had been in the backlog for a long time, so I was able to make actual contributions right from the start.

At that point, I had only ever changed some lines of PHP in WordPress plugins for my first math site, mawiwi.de.

The most notable contribution in my first month was the end-to-end development of a service that monitored the health of other internal services.

Techstack: Java, Spring Boot, REST

2. Month: Data Science

In my second month, I was assigned to a data science team. I did everything one does being an inexperienced data scientist: Data cleaning, data analysis, data visualization, data modeling, data evaluation, and data presentation.

I trained a TensorFlow model to classify invoices from handymen, labeled some data, and presented it to the team and the product owner.

Techstack: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow

No longer an intern!

After my internship, I got the offer to work at Eucon for the rest of my studies. I accepted and worked there for the next six months before I started my bachelor's thesis and eventually started exploring entrepreneurship.

1. Project: GDPR

To be able to use data from customers, Eucon had to make sure that they were GDPR compliant. So, I had to anonymize hundreds of thousands of records efficiently.

This was a minor project, but I still like including it because it was my first ticket, and a senior dev had attached a 5 step instruction on how to do it.

In every single line, there was at least one technology I had never heard of :D

But it was still fun to develop my first small Bash service.

Techstack: Bash

2. Project: Data-MVP

Another department was working on the MVP for a large project. They were aiming to get a lot of funding from the parent company. I developed the MVP by focusing on its most essential aspects using a combination of PowerBI and Python.

Unfortunately, I cannot go into further detail about this project publicly.

However, the MVP was a success, and the project got the required funding.

Techstack: Python, PowerBI

My final thoughts

To this day, I love Eucon for giving me the opportunity to view IT as a viable career path. Everybody was super friendly, and from the start, I got to work on real projects and make fundamental contributions. I felt super good to receive the offer to stay at Eucon and start as a full-time Data Scientist, even though I had to decline because I got a stipend to improve my education.

But this is another story you can read here.