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Finishing my internship at Spindle

Written by Moh Al Rawe on 26th June 2017

• internship
• provisioning

In my previous blog post, I introduced myself and talked about my journey. In this post, I’ll tell you a bit more about what I’ve been working on at Spindle.

Protect personal information

Nowadays, the Internet provides us with a lot of help and options to make our life more comfortable and easier. However, at the same time, you need to share a lot of personal information to create an account or to log in. As a result, worries about personal information and privacy arise.

In general, programmers invest a lot of time on making sure that your personal information is safe and stays out of the hands of hackers. This is one of the reasons why we created a feature called “secure calling” for our telephony platform VoIPGRID. Secure calling is a method that prevents hackers to listen to your call while your calling. Not only do we want to prevent hackers from listening, but the government as well.

Making secure calling easier

The secure calling function is built into the VoIPGRID platform. To apply it, the user has to follow some steps in the phone provisioning. For some users, those steps can be difficult and confusing, which makes it less likely that users will use secure calling. My internship focused on making secure calling easier by automating the provisioning.

But first: tutorials

It was challenging for me to start with programming after six years of not doing it, but I was excited to get started. To practice my skills I worked on the project to automate secure calling, but soon I realized how big the VoIPGRID platform is. Since VoIPGRID is written in Python and Django, I needed to get some warming up before I could start working on the project. So, I followed tutorials, like Django Girls and Codecademy and learned the Python programming language.

Calling secure with just one click

My project focused on the automation of encrypted calling in the VoIPGRID platform, so the user can secure his call with one click in the platform. VoIPGRID supports two kinds of IP phones: Cisco and Yealink.

Each of them works in a different way. To provision a Cisco phone, you need to use the IP address of the phone, while for Yealink provisioning you need to use the MAC address. One of the other differences is how you can change the default settings. With Cisco you can do this through writing XML files, but with Yealink you need to actually write some code.

With the help of my awesome colleagues Jeroen and Rosien, who kept me motivated to finish the project, we succeeded in automating the provisioning of both the Yealink and Cisco phones. The new function is now almost ready to use.

Some closing thoughts

As this is my last week of my internship at Spindle, maybe it’s nice to say some closing words about working in a new environment. If you want to adapt to a new workplace and the people around you are not open or you feel a distance, you will always feel like you don’t belong and that will reflect negatively on your work progress. Gladly, I didn’t get this feeling working at Spindle, although I did experience a language barrier sometimes. My language feeling is good enough to communicate (I think :D) but not strong enough to make jokes and to understand jokes right away. Besides that, I had a great time at Spindle and can’t wait for my new adventure at another company. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested!