Portfolio - Oberon Interactive

In early 2009, I started my last internship. In a bold move, I made the decision to go to Amsterdam; in part because I had already made contact with the company there two years earlier (before my internship at FBTO), but also because I figured I should make a big step in life and move out of the relative safety of my parental house / area. The company I went to was Oberon Interactive, a… I guess it’s a marketing company; it started out in the 90’s making screensavers, which, in the pre-internet era, was a good digital marketing tool - the kind of thing that would be handed out via diskettes or bundled with CD’s packaged along computer magazines. As the internet evolved, so did they, moving more and more towards online marketing - building websites, Facebook pages and apps, and later on, mobile applications. They had a go at the mobile gaming market when I was there too with Merchant, a location-based iOS game. I never heard of it outside of that company, so I’m not sure if it was a big success (although they did release a sequel later on)

In any case, my assignment there was an extension of a job they did for Voetbal International, a Dutch football magazine and TV show. They had a weekly event, “Elftal van de Maand” (team of the month, but it might be weekly, I forgot), which they wanted to have us rebuild. A colleague at Oberon did the front-end in Flash, and it was up to me to build the back-end side of things.

Now, Voetbal International’s website ran / runs on a java-based content management system called GX WebManager, made by a Dutch company from Nijmegen. It leans heavily on a plugin system powered by OSGI, allowing for pluggable components and the like. Each component in turn is made out of one of several components; services, front-end components, and components that appear in the administration panels of the application. The back-end looked a bit like Word, where editors can write posts in a WYSIWYG editor. I forgot the specifics, it’s been over five years now.

Anyway, one of the things you could do there is insert a component, which appears as a widget - or whatever - on the front-end. In this particular case, it allows an editor to pick the players that were available for the site’s visitors to position on the field. I don’t know if I have any screenshots of it lying around anywhere, would be neat if I did. I also had a quick look at their site, couldn’t find the functionality still in use anymore. Should check back on a Thursday at 4 PM.

Anyway, my role was to figure out that plugin system (called WCB’s - Webmanager Content Bundles. Not entirely accurate because it’s not content, but hey), build an API that the Flash front-end could send votes to, design the database, read VI’s impressive database of players for the editors to pick out of, etcetera. I don’t actually recall if we managed to finish it in the end, but, I got through the internship with a high grade, lots of new experiences, I gave a good presentation and report for school, and in the end even got a job offer - not at Oberon itself (not until years later anyway), but at Voetbal International’s parent company, WPG Uitgevers (a book and magazine publishing co-operation, which had a dozen book publishers and magazines). I should probably save that one for another page, I ended up working for them for a year and a half, part of which I spent at Voetbal International’s headquarters in Gouda where I finished the Elftal van de Maand and managed to break their site when it went live the first time.