Autor: Leonardo Renn

I feel like I am becoming a more important part of Speechstorm than ever before. This is due the importance of a telephone meeting we had on friday where I was not only setting up the call itself but also contributing to the further development of the spanish localization task we are currently working on. We were talking to an american company which as a little side note also provided for the very known of apple devices Siri. In this call where me and two other colleagues were connected to the three persons on the other side of the world were talking about further development questions I was able to ask important questions and felt really „useful“ if you know what I mean. The call took a lot more than expected but it was a huge contribution to our ongoing tasks.

Today I had an appointment at 12 o clock to meet up with me supervisors from Germany. We met in our conference room and had a nice chat about what my work here is all about and how i am getting along with it. After introducing the AFIB to my Speechstorm supervisor we discussed what I learned and how I feel about my work here. All in all it was nice to show them that I am learning a lot here and not just wasting my time. Followed up by the discussion we took some photos and I had the opportunity to show them around my working place and explain a little more about it. They had some more visits on their strict time table where they are going to meet my other german colleagues and find out more about their work here in Belfast and Dublin.

Whoever told us that it is not possible to rent a car under the age of 25 was mistaken and wasn’t well informed. You just have to ask for an „under age insurance“ and you are good to go. With just 60 Pounds we took the car for a day and had an amazing trip along the coast filled with great impression and an incredible landscape. I will try to capture as many details as possible in further posts but I am kind of devastated and sleepy after driving around 250 miles on the wrong side of the road! Ill end with one of my favourite pictures of todays trip:

Yesterday one of our spanish neighbours was celebrating is 30th birtday and we all gathered in his apartment to have a nice cup of hot tea combined with tradiontal spanish food which was made really well made and was delicious. After having long lasting discussion about the culuture differences and the ongoing developemnt in our home countries we went to a local pub which also a kind of gambling center. We had an awesome time everyone was really friendly and we definitley made some new friends here. Today I took the cab to the International Airport of Belfast setting up my contract with the car rental which in the end was refused due my lack of a Visa card. Still I wasn’t going to give up and I made a new appointment for tommorow, this time equipped with a Visa card. Our plan is to follow up the coast and see all the nice places we already heared about. Finally we are going to wittness the true nature of the green country.

After learning a bit more about Java Script I got in a meeting a so called „knowledge share“ which was really interesting to witness. I got introduced to some new features and side projects which are running in the background and I wasn´t aware of. My task for the week was to write a little script which is going to test some new implementations written by a colleague of mine. This is going to test wheather the text to speech enginge is recognizing our written code including audio feedback which is really usefull to have. I am really looking forward to the weekend as there is an awfull lot happening but more about that soon!

My weekend was pretty relaxed and I had time to set up my livestream which worked better than intended. I will stream from now and then in a kind of internet radio which definitley will keep me busy for a while. Although our internet connection is kind of unstable it was a reason to set up my own private wifi. This worked for some while but the setup here is more than outdated. It seems like the one router operating at the bottom of this building is repeating the signal to floor one which will then again be repeated to floor two and so on… As we are living on the fourth floor it is definitley part of the problem and I am trying to reach out to our landlord next week to offer him my help setting up a more stable enviroment. Also I made a little trip to the city centre with the help of my bike to explore some parts of Belfast I didn’t see yet which really was interesting as I discovered a huge shopping mall which I didn’t hear about yet.

On Friday I was introduced to the real coding work that is going to be a big part of my work at Speechstorm. It took some while to understand the concept behind it as it is a massive project and is a huge amount of documentation behind it.

One of our product architects was so kind to give ma deep look inside the coding work and also gave me a better understanding overall. Its incredible how much work and details there are but I am really getting into it now which also makes my work more focused and I can read about nearly everything in our document repository. Next week there will be some more informations about our next big customer which will also benefit to my working progress there a lot.

Yesterday at lunch time me and almost everyone in the office met at an Indian restaurant to welcome the new arrivals at Speechstorm which led to some nice chats about life in Belfast combined with delicous food.
Certainly this was a really nice way of a company meeting and I am still happy to be part of it. My work is still focused on the localization including research on grammar and programming around call flows to get more familiar with the environment and java script in general.

Also I had my first impression about how beautiful Belfast can be with a little bit of sunshine which is definitely a nice diversion compared to our daily rain. Still just for the quote it did rain afterwards!

For the next week my schedule at Speechstorm is going to be to find out how the grammar structure which is already in place could be modified to fit into the other upcoming projects. I already wrote a detailed overview about the differences which are crucial to the development of the project. A good example is that if someone in Spain is telling you to take the bus in southern america this could be understood as humping the bus. Finding such differences is very important as many people could get upset by finding out that a similar but not equal language is used just for the purpose of not doing that extra bit of work. Obviously Speechstorm is taking this effort and I am more than happy to contribute to it.

My first week at Speechstorm is over and I am more than happy that my work there will not be a everyday task like changing keyboards or bringing a monitor from place a to place b and contribute to their product. Its amazing how everyone is so friendly and supportive and after just a few days I feel more than accepted, even more than that I feel like I am part of something big which will definitely change my view concerning small companies and their way of working.
I will try to define my work there in one of my next posts and show how a day at Speechstorm looks like.

We are in Belfast for quite some while now and I can certainly say that the daily tasks and troubles are more and more easy to handle. Being able to send groceries at home by ordering them online is still on the to-do list as we preferred taking a cab to one of the bigger Tesko stores.

Still I can´t believe how the people get a long when everything is so expensive in comparison to Germany but talking to random strangers on the street is helping a lot to understand their way of living.