Workshop with partners / Veriff

During September, Veriff hosted two awesome interactive workshops for our students in their Tallinn office. They worked with Veriff’s employees and learned Kubernetes and React testing skills.

Veriff is the industry leader in online identity verification, helping businesses achieve greater levels of trust and making the internet a better place for everyone. Veriff’s ​​intelligent decision engine analyzes thousands of technological and behavioral variables in seconds, matching people to more than 11,000 government-issued IDs from over 190 countries. Veriff employs over 550 people worldwide from 60 different nationalities who are dedicated to helping businesses to build a more secure world.

Students came together in a smaller group, learned new skills and had fun together with other Veriff employees. Oh, and also ate pizza. Some might even say the best pizza in Tallinn. 

In the first workshop, Siim Tiilen and Ahmed Shafik, Veriff’s resident Kubernetes wizards, showed students how to deploy their first application to Kubernetes and answer their questions based on Veriff’s production experience. During this workshop, they focused on the most important practical aspects a developer working with Kubernetes should know.

What is Kubernetes? Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Watch the video to learn more!

In the second workshop, Kateryna Porshnieva, Head of Developer Relations at Veriff, covered best practices in testing, libraries, and tools. Participants had the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of testing in JavaScript and writing a set of tests for an application.

Students’ emotions

“Me and my friends arrived at Veriff’s Tallinn headquarters half an hour before the start of the workshop. The staff sat us down and offered us tea until others arrived. After that, one of the employees, Kateryna, took us on a tour around the modern office, introducing us to the cool workforce,” says Laura-Eliise Marrandi about the start of the first workshop.

“After the tour, the workshop began. “People gathered around the long meeting table, working together side by side. Our guide, Siim, was a Kubernetes expert.”

“He enlightened us with the knowledge of clusters and nodes. I really enjoyed the uniform working environment. If even a single person got stuck, it meant a complete halt for everyone else. Despite the regular pauses, we still managed to work through the entire material in a timely manner.”

Although it was an intense workshop, there was still time to enjoy yourself. “The workshop was divided into two parts. Between them, we had a pizza break in the kitchen. It was one of the best pizzas I had ever had! We got to socialize amongst ourselves and the staff at Veriff. Overall, it was a much-needed break from the intense work session.”

The second workshop was about React testing. “It followed a similar schedule as the Kubernetes workshop, but we got actual exercises to complete before moving on to the next topic. I really enjoyed the hands-on experience, and it helped solidify what we had just been taught.” 

Laura-Eliise had this to say about her experience: “Overall the experience was stellar and I would definitely recommend the workshop to anyone who’s interested! I guess kood/Jõhvi students have a huge advantage in this.”

Veriff’s view on the workshop

Veriff’s team was glad to have a go on a new and exciting challenge – teaching! The day was filled with many learning points and questions that all found their answers. 

Siim from Veriff had this to say about the workshop: “I truly hope students left the workshop with some new knowledge. From my side, it was quite challenging as you needed to more or less start from zero to teach something so complex as Kubernetes. But in the end, everyone managed to deploy their docker container into the cloud and access it successfully.”

“It was a fun challenge for me to take something as complex as Kubernetes and make it understandable for everyone. Also, the students themselves were really motivated to learn, and that made it easier to work together successfully,” said Ahmed Shafik, DevOps engineer from Veriff.

Next to the workshop part, the students had casual conversations with the employees about life at Veriff and overall development. “During pizza break and after they also had a lot of questions about the company and if/where they can use what they just learned in future,” added Siim. Ahmed also wanted to emphasize that students can always reach out to Siim or himself with any questions.

This was not the first or last time we collaborated with our partners and students. See more past events from here.