Matt Brophy

Working at SCS has been a truly rewarding experience that will remain with me for the rest of my career. I was amazed at how quickly I and the other interns were brought up to speed on our projects, and even more at how quickly we were given a chance to contribute to critical portions of the projects. The SCS in-house technologies (Spice Formula and Spice Patterns) and the "anything is possible" attitudes of the SCS employees combine to create an incredibly productive development environment in which problems are reduced to mere stepping stones towards solutions.

As a longer term intern, I really had the chance to submerge myself completely in the project, and contribute at even the deepest levels. I can't explain the feeling of satisfaction that you feel as an intern when you are able to see your software being demo'ed to potential customers, and experience their positive reactions.

Matt Brophy
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
2008 and 2009 internships

Jian Wang

I spent this summer in SCS as an intern in CAS team. The training in first week gave me some general idea of their programming language. LiangJie, another intern, and I developed the online reservation system with SCS own development tools and the whole process was indeed amazing to me. I was not very familiar with software development at the beginning yet I did finish the project in around two weeks, which gave me more confidence in future work. I would like to thank the CAS team here for their time and effort. During the development of this reservation system, I also learned quite a lot about the newspaper advertisement industry.
Then we spent almost one month in our own FinalWords project. We only had a rough idea of what we wanted to implement. Richard and the CAS team helped us to analyze the whole project and figure out the steps to complete. We did some research on the current newspaper obituary market and decided to integrate our project into CAS’s current system. Thus we can take advantage of their existing classified advertisement system and the project would be much easier to finish. Besides, our project could also be used by SCS own system to implement some additional features. Thank Richard for letting us do this project in SCS.
Last but not least, the “Agile development with Scrum," which is used in CAS team, also impressed me quite a lot. We have team meetings at least every two weeks to discuss about everyone’s progress and plan the next sprint. This helped keep the whole team in the same track and let everyone choose the task he prefers. The customer could also be aware of the project’s progress in the whole process. It’s indeed a win-win situation. Apart from that, the frequent brown-bags also help everyone in the company to know about other team’s work.
This summer is quite educational to me and I enjoyed working in SCS in this summer.

Jian Wang
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
Summer 2008 internships

LiangJie Hong

Today, I finished my last day in Software Consulting Services, LLC. as a summer intern. Two months period gave me an unforgettable experience that not only I learned a lot about software development skills and methods but also I worked happily in a family-like company.
The unique experience for me started from the time when I first sat down in front of the computer and began to write my first piece of program here in SCS, a totally new world came to me, even for a person who started programming at early ages in the primary school. Not every IT company has a full chain of development tools. You can mention Sun, Microsoft and IBM, who are industry giants. But for a small software company which only has around 50 people, it’s amazing and definitely a challenge. Here in SCS, they have their own compilers, virtual machines, database tools, web frameworks, version control tools and even mail systems, which shocked me a lot when I heard of this. I learned a lot of these tools with a great help from my team peers. Although I can’t use most of them out of the company, the process of learning is still valuable for me especially for a student never worked off campus before. This is definitely special experience you can’t find in most of small software companies.
I will remember the days I spent here as an intern and those interesting stories Richard told to me.

LiangJie Hong
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
Summer 2008 internships

Ivan Stoev

As a co-op at SCS, I actively participate in the development of Layout-8000, an automated ad dummying system. Even though I was not very familiar with the newspaper production process when I started, SCS provided me with appropriate training to learn what I needed to know. The training also helped me easily adapt to their proprietary programming language and development tools.
Tasks vary from coding simple visual enhancements to implementing core program functionalities. This has helped me greatly improve my programming skills. Layout-8000 is a complex project, and working as part of a larger team is an educational experience in itself. It is quite a satisfaction to look at the product log and look at the tasks that our team has completed [Agile development with Scrum].
What I like most about SCS is the software development methodology our team uses. Through several short development cycles, we are able to accomplish more in a shorter period of time. With this decentralized approach, I am also able to pick tasks that interest me. The daily meeting are there to make sure everyone is on the same page and all the impediments are cleared out. I continuously get feedback and support from my counterparts and superiors. I've also had the chance to visit one of the sites that SCS works with. Meetings with customers occur regularly and our team presents our progress.
I'm glad I got an opportunity to complete my co-op at SCS, because it is a company that appreciates the work that interns/co-ops do. My experience at SCS will also affect my career plans in a positive way, because it helped me realize that I enjoy working as a software developer.

Ivan Stoev
Lehigh University
Class of 2009
Computer Science major
Fall 2007 and Summer 2008 internships

Kyle Kotch

This summer marks my second full year at SCS and my third summer as a full-time intern. Over the course of my career at SCS I have been involved in various product lines and projects. My current project is SCS dReason, our Business Intelligence product based on the open source Pentaho Project. This has been, personally, the most rewarding project that I have had the pleasure of working on. When I returned from a semester in Australia I was immediately pulled to rapidly develop 35 reports in this system for one of our customers in less than 30 days. So the pressure was on to learn this system and create a stable and fairly robust reporting engine out of it based on AdMAX data.
Keith quickly got me up to speed and we managed to deliver these reports on time, accurately, and in a foreign language. These reports only scratched the surface of our capabilities with this system. Soon, we were developing faster PostgreSQL databases, Mondrian schemas, and Pentaho reports. Through small tweaks in the way we designed our queries we were able to get considerable improvement.
Keith and I continued development to create dashboards and expand our analysis to support ad production data from SCS/Track. With this full-fledged business intelligence platform, we began doing demos for other customers and have made some sales. The fact that a large portion of the code behind this project is mine brings me great pride and joy. I can now see my work being used in production on a daily basis to effectively monitor sales and production data.
All of my experiences at SCS have helped me learn new things and become a better software developer. This project, in particular, has taught me many things ranging from Scrum project management to PostgreSQL databases that are helping me in the classroom this semester as well as in my future career, wherever that may be. I have had, and continue to have, a great time working and learning at SCS and am grateful for all the opportunities they have given me.

Summer 2008 internship

During the summer of 2006 I was employed by Software Consulting Services. This proved to be an invaluable experience for me and greatly enhanced my software engineering skills. My major is Computer Science, so the ability to work in the software development industry was a great experience, especially since I was just finishing my freshman year of college. Throughout the summer I participated in meetings to discuss upgrades and future development of their products. I worked side by side with current application developers to complete customer requested enhancements, support, and general maintenance. Not only did I learn valuable programming skills, such as BASH shell scripting and Linux system structure, but I also learned how to better work in a development team. I also learned how to make software from a customer/user perspective instead of from a IT/technician perspective. This allows me to create software that a user will like to use and want to use, instead of have to use.
Currently, some of my software is being used in the field at customer locations and the remaining software is being integrated into future releases. This internship offered me the rare opportunity to see real customers using my software and to get feedback from them. Often interns never see their software being used by customers. Watching your product be released is an experience that most people don't experience until they have graduated college and are working full time, but I got to experience that in the summer after my freshman year. This company allowed me more flexibility and let my programming affect their products more than I ever imagined. I have also met some amazing people here that truly care about what the interns do and make sure that they learn and have a positive impact on the company. Through this internship I have made many contacts that will help me in the future when I look for permanent employment after graduation.

Kyle Kotch
Lafayette College
Class of 2009
Computer Science major
Summer 2006 intern

Scott Weaver

When I started my summer at SCS, I came in knowing nothing about newspaper presses and never having written software professionally.  In my first week, I learned a whole new programming language with the help of SCS employees and fellow interns who had been around for longer.  I was then faced with the daunting task of learning a whole program, WebPresser, and improving upon its user interface.  At first, this seemed impossible to me since I didn't know the first thing about presses, but throughout the summer, I made more and more progress until the project seemed within my grasp.  By the end of the summer, I not only dramatically improved the user interface, but I also learned many valuable things about both the newspaper and software industry.  My summer at SCS was both educational and at times entertaining, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Scott Weaver
Moravian College
Class of 2008
Computer Science major
Summer 2007 internship

Joyce Pan

My experience at SCS can only be summed up by one word: extraordinary. At SCS, interns are not asked to do menial tasks, but are assigned real tasks, projects and applications that will be sold and promoted to customers. It gives you a sense of accomplishment knowing that the company cares and values you more than just an intern.

Joyce is from Taiwan. She is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and helped with SCS's Chinese newspaper customers.

Joyce Pan
Lehigh University
Class of 2010
Computer Science and Business major
Summer 2007 internship

Chris Hausman

I had the opportunity to intern with SCS for two summers where I worked on a wide variety of projects. Some were quick code fixes and others were multiple month projects where I started from scratch. For some of these projects I was on my own, free to determine how to achieve certain tasks and the best way to meet our end goals. On others I worked closely with one of the development teams, sometimes to locate and fix a bug, other times to determine how to implement a new feature. I cannot imagine a better company to have gotten my first real world working experience with than SCS. It was a great place for me to intern because they gave me work that mattered. Throughout all of my projects, it always felt like I was contributing something to the company, and that is a great feeling to have during your first internship.

Chris Hausman
Penn State University
Class of 2007
Computer Science major
Summer 2006 intern