For 12 weeks of the summer 2016 I interned at the Met Office Informatics lab as part of the Met Office Summer Placement Scheme.

I chose the Informatics Lab specifically as their work is focused around increasing the usefulness of data and making prototypes; which firstly, is really interesting, but is also very useful to my PhD work.

A background in atmospheric science was anecdotally useful during my internship. Mostly, my time was heavily technology focused and involved a lot of coding, including making a web app and helping to build an augmented reality interactive sandpit.

On the lab’s blog you can read about my time in the lab and some of the projects I was involved with, including the the great big rhino project. You can also read about my experience at Mozilla Festival 2016, an annual open technology conference that I was invited to attend alongside the Informatics Lab team.

Since returning to my PhD I have put my improved coding skills to good use and automated many procedures for analysing instrument data that were previously performed manually (and developed some new ones!). This has made my analysis and data interpretation much faster and more insightful allowing me to produce more impactful work.

Thanks to the lab, my approach to learning new technologies is much more confident and is a major reason the content of this blog exists.