Jobbutplassering at Highsoft

Hi! We are two 10th graders from Flatbygdi School in Vik i Sogn, Norway, the town in which Highsoft is located. We got to spend four days at the Highsoft office as part of our school’s “work placement” program (called “Jobbutplassering” in Norwegian). The work placement program is something all 10th graders at our school must complete. Participating in this program requires students to write a job application for the job/company they would like to work at, and if accepted, one gets four days to experience the job environment.

We started on the morning of Monday the 21st of January. After an office tour with the Human Resource representative, Julia Gomez, we had a meeting with the CEO, Grethe Hjetland. At the meeting, she talked about the beginnings of Highsoft what the company does, along with some statistics about its sales and growth. Highsoft offers three main libraries (software that developers use when building websites): Highcharts, Highstock, Highmaps and Gantt, and many wrappers (“helper programs”) to support a variety of programming languages.

Over the next few days, we learned a lot about the company’s departments tech, sales, and marketing. We even had a chance to participate in a sales meeting; it is amazing to experience how the group members work together to discuss and resolve their challenges.
Torstein Hønsi, the founder of Highsoft, took some time to explain the basic concept of programming and showed us how to use JSFiddle, and we created our first chart. We used the Highcharts library in the beginning, then we used the Highcharts cloud visual tool. The chart, we created with jsfiddle, displays the demographic of Norway from 2010 to 2018:

Even though it was really fun to try some basic programming, it was challenging to get the chart done, as we had never tried coding before. We relied a lot on Torstein’s help before we managed to make a proper graph. On the other hand, Highcharts cloud is more simple, user-friendly and easy. There’s no programming required, we just added the data, and picked the graph type, then customize the chart using colors and sizes. It’s super simple for anyone to get started.

We also met with Mustapha Mekhatria the community manager at Highsoft; he gave us an introduction about HTML, Javascript, and CSS (the building blocks of any webpage). We practiced what we learned on the website of nrk.no by changing the content. It was a really interesting and funny experience.

Our time at Highsoft was great. We’ve learned a lot about the company and work environment. The office was a really nice place to be and all the people are really nice, easy to talk with and helpful.

Highsoft is definitely the place we would like to work one day!