My journey towards becoming a true SilverStriper

In today’s blog post, we share with you the story of our new intern, Tobie Jayme, who is well on his way to becoming a true SilverStriper.

Welcome to the family

My journey began on Monday, 14 November 2016—I officially started as an intern at SilverStripe Wellington headquarters.

From the moment I set foot in the office, I was greeted by the warm and welcoming culture of SilverStripe. I could see that this culture that they coin as “Stripeology” was living and breathing through each of these individuals.

Even though each person was engrossed and invested in their work, they still took a slice of their time just to greet my fellow intern Sacha and me, which speaks volumes about the company's heart-warming culture.

SilverStripe actively exercises its creative spirit through events such as ‘HackDay’ where people would embark on new projects with such passion to learn and create something new. 

The culture here at SilverStripe kicks some serious butt.

Tobie in his new fancy office

Creating something from nothing

Sacha and I teamed up to make the Galactic Donuts. For our first project, we were tasked to create a website that would express some interesting facts about us along with a simplistic blog section on our experiences here at SilverStripe.

Galactic Donuts website in the making

We took on the approach of treating our first project like a real-client project. This meant we did our own research, design and development while also adhering to Agile principles.

I appreciated the idea of “creating something from scratch” as it allowed us to design and create with freedom. We were able to add our own taste and flavour into it, which elevated this product from another generic looking website to one that we genuinely cared about.

I soon came to realise that I was following one of the core values at SilverStripe–“continuous improvement over perfection”, so we could continuously exercise the creative spirit within us.

Sometimes I have to kick myself in the head because “working” shouldn’t be this much fun.

Working with a great cast

It was an absolute blast to work with Sacha as we both came in with high levels of energy and enthusiasm. We worked collaboratively on all aspects of the project and found ourselves constantly bouncing ideas off each other.

I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from Sacha, particularly in the field of design where I picked up skills such as Photoshop and Bootstrap. In return, I shared some of my knowledge as a developer, which ultimately helped us grow as designers and developers.

The level of support we received throughout this project has been overwhelming. From our line managers to our mentors and buddies—each individual along the way aided the evolution of our skills and knowledge leading us closer to becoming the true definition of a SilverStriper.

Do you want to join us and become a true SilverStriper, too? There are many vacancies now. Please visit our job site and get your journey started!