Bastian, Apprentice Software Development

I'm Basti, 20 years old and originally from Westerwald. I've been doing my apprenticeship as an IT specialist in application development at CHECK24 in Cologne since August 2021. Starting around the beginning of my second year of training, I've been working every day as part of one of our development teams to implement cool new features, adapt features and generally improve the software. In my spare time I really enjoy playing table tennis and taking part in competitions with my team at the weekends. Apart from that, we regularely play football at CHECK24, where I have also taken part in a few times.

When I was at school, my favorite subjects were maths, physics and computer science: I always enjoyed dealing with numbers and data, especially developing solutions to problems. That's why I started studying computer science in Siegen after graduating from high school. During my studies I realised that I enjoy practical programming the most. However, the proportion of practical programming was too small for me during my studies, which is why I dropped out of the course during the second semester and decided to do my apprenticeship here at CHECK24.

Our development is clearly divided into frontend and backend: we use Angular in the frontend and the PHP frameworks Laminas and Mezzio in the backend. Other than that, we use numerous tools from Atlassian. For us developers, the ticket system "Jira" and "Bitbucket" for version management are very important. But my favourite is our DIE, where we use PhpStorm. There are many practical functions and integrations that make life easier. In addition, you can configure everything individually and there are an almost infinite number of plug-ins.

The apprenticeship usually lasts three years.The first year can be divided into a front-end and back-end part: You first learn the basics together with other trainees. Then, in regular meetings with experienced developers, you learn more and more things. During that year, you don't work on the product itself, but can choose your own projects. In the back-end part, for example, I developed a tournament system, or in the front-end part, I built a small web chat together with other trainees.In the second year, you can choose between frontend and backend. From then on, you also work in one of the teams and thus on the product. You then change teams every few months for the remaining two years, so that you end up rotating through all the teams. The training is completed with a project that you have to plan, carry out and document in order to present it.

I was a bit nervous before my interview - but you don't need to be. In my experience, all the people are always very nice, you can ask all the colleagues at any time, and everyone is happy to help. So just be relaxed and be yourself!