Kyle Osborne’s work experience

This week, Kyle Osborne – a year 12 student at a local school – has been doing work experience at Clear Books.

Kyle has a strong interest in coding and technology, and so his work experience here at Clear Books gave him an opportunity to put these skills into practice and gain some valuable office experience.

During his 3 days with us, Kyle kept a diary of his tasks and his thoughts on the world of work. We’d like to thank Kyle for his help this week, and wish him all the best for his A-Levels next year!

Kyle’s diary

Day 1

On the first day of my work experience, I was quite worried about what the work place environment was going to be like. But it turned to be a really interesting work place and company compared to the other work experience I’ve done in the past.

Everyone was really nice to me on the first day, and I created my very own website from scratch with help from Alex, one of Clear Books’ developers. Also I was surprised to find out that during lunch time some of the people play video games like Mario Kart 8 on the Wii!

On my first day I have managed to learn a lot of programming skills.

Day 2

Today’s my second day of work experience and I have got to say that it’s very tiring riding a bike to Clear Books! It is very dangerous to ride a bike on a busy road and it feels like I might get knocked of my bike any second.

I have been learning how to code in PHP, and compared to learning Python and Javascript it is very different. In PHP you have to be very specific in what you want the computer to do, and you have to use American spelling which I find hard. Another thing about PHP that I find difficult is that you have to place the semicolon in the brackets or at the end of the line.

Day 3

So this is my third day of work experience, and each day for me is different. Today’s bike ride to the office was wet and miserable – thanks rain. But once I got in I continued with learning PHP.

A developer called David offered me the chance to learn CSS which is another computer language used to design the actual interface that the user uses. The task was to make a complete reconstruction of a screenshot of a website from scratch with very little help. At first I was completely stuck with what I had to do because CSS was another completely different concept to PHP.

I had just managed to complete a big chunk of the website when David said that I needed to create a table and not just have the text in separate lines. After I fixed that problem and hurdle, I looked how to create a panel to put a select amount of text into.