First Month at IFS

Thought of sharing the things what we did at IFS during the first Month. I’ll try to make it as brief as possible.

About the project…
During the first week we have been given a project which was to develop a Training Course Management System. It is an external project and the deadline was set at middle of January. The system consists of two parts; Training evaluation section and Online exam section. To proceed with the project we need to have a good knowledge about the .Net Framework, C#, ASP, AJAX toolkit, PL-SQL (As IFS uses Oracle as their database), and UML designing using Rational Rose. So a series of sessions was held, and it continues until now. There is also another project. But the demo is not yet given. So We don’t know much about it yet.

Things we learnt…
During the training sessions we learnt many new things. At the beginning I was a bit worried, because not starting actual work of the project directly. But now I know the value of a proper training. Those sessions were full of quite good exercises which take so much time to finish. We learnt about,
• PL-SQL - which provides the Procedural Language Extension to the Structured Query Language; it goes in par with the Oracle databases which is used at IFS.
• UML designing using Rational Rose – IFS uses Rational Rose to model their class diagrams. And they use the model file (.mdl) created using Rational Rose to generate the basic code segments.
• IFS applications – IFS has a set of their own applications, which are used to handle the software development stuff easily and efficiently. So we learnt about the Design Tool which is used to convert the class diagram into the PL-SQL and language specific codes.
• C# language – As the .NET framework and C# will be the main language of future IFS windows clients we were able to have some good sessions in C# language. Today also we are having another C# session.
• Apart from that mean time I learnt using AJAX toolkit and a bit of ASP.NET.

Our day to day life at IFS…
We are at the 8th floor of IFS building which has 9 floors. It is the training floor. At IFS all the people should be called by their names, as in most of the companies. And we wear casual dress. Our day starts at 8 a.m. and finishes at 5 (but at most occasions we leave close to 5.30). During the day at around 10.30 we get the morning tea break ( free Nescafe also available). Tea should be prepared by our selves. Then around at 12.30 we get our lunch which we get free of charge. Lunch consists of different menus everyday and the dessert. At IFS employees get the lunch break full 1 hour, even some play cards at that time (caram also possible). Then around at 3.45 we get the evening tea break.( we normally take only about 15 mntz of tea break each) After finishing the day’s work we leave around at 5.15-5.30. After the end of day we play badminton. All the people are really friendly at IFS and I admire the friendly environment of its which makes me feel like home.