From Placement to Professional

My Journey from University to Brightside

Leaving university can feel like stepping off a cliff. One moment you're immersed in lectures, group projects, and late-night study sessions; the next, you're expected to contribute meaningfully to a live business environment. For me, that transition began during my final year at the University of Plymouth, when I secured a placement at Brightside, a Bristol-based insurance broker with a wide array of product programmes.

What made this opportunity unique was the structure of my course, which allowed me to complete my final year while working. It gave me a powerful blend of academic theory and hands-on industry practice. And Brightside didn’t treat me like an intern—they gave me real work, real challenges, and real accountability.

One of the early projects I tackled was refactoring our solution structure, introducing namespaces to bring order and clarity to the codebase. At the time, the front end was largely PHP-based, but I was part of a forward-thinking discussion about modernising it. I built a proof of concept to replace PHP pages with Microsoft MVC Razor pages. This approach allowed us to phase the transition page by page, proving we didn’t need a big bang rewrite to modernise our systems.

Another highlight was introducing object-oriented practices into our PHP codebase. At the time, this wasn’t common practice—many of the team had grown up in a procedural paradigm. But by modelling our components in a more structured and reusable way, we laid the groundwork for maintainable development.

My crowning achievement at Brightside came when I tackled the automated testing setup. The team was using QTP (QuickTest Professional), but running tests sequentially was a bottleneck. I designed a microservices-based system that split test execution across multiple machines. It was my first real encounter with microservice architecture, and it lit a spark that would define much of my future work.

Of course, there were frustrations too. I remember one enormous VB6 file we had to work with—it was so bloated that the editor would crash if we didn’t trim it down before editing. These experiences taught me not just about code, but about the hidden costs of technical debt.

Brightside was a formative chapter in my career. It showed me the difference between good and bad engineering practices, taught me the power of collaboration, and planted the seeds for the architectural principles I live by today. Looking back, it wasn’t just a placement—it was the launchpad for everything that came after.