Co-op Highlight: Kobe Shimoyama

After working a productive summer and fall with us, Kobe Shimoyama is in the final stretch of his extended Co-op term with Vivacity Technologies! Between projects, he’s been spending some time shadowing the development team working on VivaCitadel while getting mentorship from our frontend engineer, Jackie Gorman. We asked for his thoughts on the dev experience so far:

“I hope to go into software development after I finish my computing science bachelor, but have never worked with a professional developer before, much less one on a production-ready project team. When leadership told me Jackie was looking to do some mentoring and was interested in shadowing, I thought it was too good to be true! It’s been amazing hearing her story and watching her and the dev team work in real time.

I got to sit in meetings between the dev team and a professional software architect, learning about automated end-to-end testing, and planning sessions not unlike the scrums I read about in class where the team scoped out sprint activities and used project management tools like Notion I had never heard of. With Jackie, I got to watch her fronted dev routine where she showed me how to develop and test components with the help of Storybook, and how to configure parts of her environment as well as her favourite tools. Next, we’re working on creating a sandbox environment for me to inspect and run code using the same tools! I can’t thank the team enough for creating space for me to explore and ask questions so relevant to my long-term goals; hearing about Jackie’s journey and experiences made me confident in the direction I want to go with my career.”

We’re happy to see Kobe grow during this Co-op and excited to see where he goes from here!