During my 6 years in industry I have worked for a number of companies.
Since joining Spider I have been involved in two main roles. I worked on an implementation of the "Stream Control Transmission Protocol". I have also worked as a Support Engineer, managing a set of clients and providing customers with technical support for all of Spider's software products.
As a development engineer, I was involved in the S.C.T.P. project from conception right through to delivery. The project deliverable consisted of a 'C' kernel module developed as a multi-platform solution to work with Solaris, HP/UX and Linux. The driver was designed around the STREAMS technology, which is present in most Unix style operating systems. S.C.T.P. is similar to TCP and sits above IP, it is one part of the Telecomm industry SIGTRAN solution.
My role in the Support Team has involved managing a group of the companies customers. This included managing the contracts, improving customer intimacy and responding to customer technical queries regarding all of Spider's software protocol products (SS7, SIGTRAN, Frame Relay, TCP). Customer issues ranged from questions regarding the operation of a particular protocol, to the resolution of defects. Customers require constant communication, via email or phone, to provide them with regular status updates. Due to the magnitude of different software/hardware setups involved, a lot of the support work involves collating information from different sources, including colleagues and technical documents.
My time with Agilent was spent working as a software engineer within their R&D section. During this time developed software for a telecomm network analyser, consisting of a Windows PC with VxWorks proprietary hardware. This took a number of different forms: requirements, design and development of an SDL compiler (written in 'C'); design and modification of an interpretative engine which responds to the output of the compiler (again in 'C'); requirements, design and development of a "Call trace" GUI which maintains and displays a database of the engine's output (written in 'C++', using the MFC library).
Due to the size of the product, communication with a number of colleagues was essential. Within my team, this involved negotiation and discussion of implementation details. On a broader scale, liaising with departments such as Marketing and Qualification proved invaluable.
I was a member of a cross-divisional process development team, whose function was to document and improve the many processes that were necessary in order to deliver their products to market.
I became involved in their recruitment procedure, doing technical interviews. This was a good opportunity to make further use of my communication skills.
In the summer between the 3rd and 4th years of my degree I worked for the Research Department within British Aerospace in Bristol. During my time there, I worked on a prototype project which involved developing multiple web interfaces for a single database. I was responsible for producing both the 'web based 3D modeling Java GUI applet' and the 'Java based CGI server' which passed data requests onto a 3rd party database.