ScraperWiki: Part I

Yesterday was the first day of my internship at Liverpool-based startup ScraperWiki. ScraperWiki offers a web-based platform that allows individuals and businesses to do data science on the web, providing tools that allow them to get, clean, analyse and visualise their data. They also offer professional data services, whereby their resident data scientists can help organisations to collect and analyse the data they are interested in.

I found ScraperWiki when I spotted their job advertisement in a “Who’s Hiring?” post on Hacker News earlier in the summer. They stood out to me as an interesting local tech startup in what seems to be an otherwise sparse area. In the past I have struggled to find any software companies within a reasonable distance, much less ones willing to take on interns, since most of the industry is concentrated down in London, far out of my reach.

Since their product appealed to me and they were in a good location, I inquired about an internship. I was invited to spend a day at their office and did so, meeting people, learning about the way they do things and pairing with a developer to do some front-end work. A few days later I was glad to hear that they had offered me an internship, which started yesterday and will continue until just before I move away to go to university in September.

So far I’ve been enjoying it, the team are very friendly and welcoming, and being around experienced developers has already been a big learning experience for me. For my first couple of days I’ve been mostly working with fellow intern Matthew Hughes, who has been at ScraperWiki for a couple of months, on a specialised tool for a client company.

During my time at the internship I intend to produce a few more blog posts as well as a final one to summarise my experience, hence the reason why this one is ‘Part I’. I’m sure I’ll learn a great deal during the next month or so, I will be looking forward to it and of course will keep this blog updated with anything that I find to be notable or interesting!