África Santeliz: MALTA

África Santeliz – IES Cendrassos Web Applications Development

At first, I did not consider the possibility of doing Erasmus+ because I was afraid of spending a few months away from my family, friends and work. But my professor of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship motivated me to take this decision. She saw that, for me, it would be a vital experience that would transform my fears into potentialities.

I can assure you that she was not wrong!

As many other people, I was afraid to leave my comfort zone. On the other hand, it was shocking for my family to explain this initiative, they did not know this possibility.

I also worried about living with strangers. I was afraid of not having a good relationship with someone, or maybe had a problem in the company.

But now I know that all those fears were unfounded.

Malta is a super small country, but with concentrated potential. I was surprised by cultural diversity, but at the same time the strong influence of the Catholic religion, present everywhere.

It is full of beautiful monuments, all with the warm island touch that give ocher, blue and white colors.

Every day there is full of surprises. It was only enough to go outside to find out about an event (concerts, exhibitions, parties, games ...).

I have had the opportunity to work for Crispo LTD, a business and computer services company based in England, but also operating in Malta.

I don't know the exact number of workers, but the ones I knew were all pleasant.

Rene Holmgren, CEO of the company, was a tutor in my practices.

My schedule was from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with a lunch break.

During the day, my colleagues and I spent most of the time programming a WordPress Plugin, a very popular Open Source CMS for commercial purposes. For this we had to touch several branches of computing at the same time: Server Management, Web Maintenance, Interface Design, Object-Oriented Programming, Databases ... A very complete and useful set for my learning.

Rene has simply been a wonderful person. Friendly, close and warm.

What I like most about him is that we shared the same sense of curiosity, especially for technology.

What I liked the most was the project itself. I love challenges, and these practices have asked me to overcome myself in every way. I have touched on aspects that I had never seen, or that I had not learned to carry solidly: Management of Web Servers, PHP language, operation of a CMS, development of plugins, management of databases ...

The only aspect to improve is to have had more time with some computer expert more experienced than me, to ask questions about the biggest blockages I had during the work. But even that represented for me an opportunity to do things on my own. And that is the most important learning I had.

I was in a huge house where there was always someone to hang out with. Casa Kappara was like a home for me, and the people I lived with as a temporary family. Having faced the challenges of everyday life alone, learning that my fears about relating to others are overcome by relating, seeing that my problems are smaller than what I imagined, is a treasure that I will carry with me during the rest of my life.