Internships at XWiki are all about learning, collaborating and embracing the values of open source. While this is true for all interns, every experience is unique, and together we'll look at the internship journey from Matéo's perspective. He joined us three months ago as a Software Development Engineer intern for a new LLM extension project we'll be telling you more in the future. Meanwhile, you can read about Matéo's time with XWiki along with his passion for video games and interest in sports in the interview below.
- Favorite artist: Daft Punk
- Best book ever read: "Kafka on the shore", by Haruki Murakami
- Dream destination: Japan
- Quote you live by: "Success is falling down seven times and getting up eight."
- At the office or remote? Remote!
Tell me about yourself briefly
I'm Matéo, 20 years old, and I was a Software Development Engineer intern at XWiki from May until August. I'm passionate about tech, so I love to talk about the news around technology (especially about hardware news). But aside of that, I'm also passionate about video games, although I haven't played in a while because my HDD broke 🙁, and I enjoy sports of all sorts (I play badminton mainly whenever I can).
The internship experience
How did you find out about XWiki and what made you choose it for an internship?
One of my professors mentioned XWiki, and after conducting some research about the company, I decided to send my resume since I was actively seeking an internship opportunity. Ludovic then proposed the LLM AI extension project to me, which I found fascinating. So I chose XWiki even though I knew the internship would be remote.
What was your internship experience like?
✅ A lot of learning about using the XWiki API.
✅ A lot of learning about front dev ressources.
✅ A lot of interesting talks about AI and ideas around it.
I did like the fact that I was working on an open-source project after all, thanks to the positive interactions it brought (even if these interactions started mostly towards the end of the internship).
What did you find to be the most interesting and challenging tasks?
The most interesting task for me was understanding the needs for the LLM extensions, and then finding ways to implement them.
The most challenging task was to understand how XWiki works as much as possible in order to make the extensions operational in every possible situation. For example, I discovered the existence of sub-wikis towards the end of my internship and had to change a lot of my code for it.
Matéo had a challenging internship to work on the first AI project at XWiki, and he did a great job delivering a working extension for XWiki. We've been looking at integrations of Generative AI as it can bring powerful features to software where you end up writing a lot of content. We also wanted to explore both using ChatGPT but also experiment with Open Source AIs, so while Matéo was working on the extension, we also studied the needs and the technologies available as open source. Obviously, since we are very keen to protect privacy and to work with open-source technologies, our long term goal is to integrate open-source LLMs into XWiki. We should have a good announcement on this soon which will allow to continue Matéo's work in this direction beyond the very nice extensions he has delivered during his internship. - Ludovic Dubost, Founder and CEO of XWiki and CryptPad
And what about integration into the environment? How easy, or difficult was it for you?
I found it easy to communicate with people when required. The remote aspect was not an issue, so I think the XWiki environment is great for that reason.
Open source impressions
Was open source something you had an interest in prior to XWiki?
Not really. I had a good opinion on open source already, but ever since I started using XWiki and working for it, I think I gained a better understanding of what open source brings to a project.
What's the open source value you identify with most?
The power of the community
Lessons learned
What would you say is the most valuable lesson you learned during your time at XWiki?
In short, organization is key!
The XWiki experience
If you could describe XWiki in one word, what would it be?
Sharing
Favorite memory at XWiki?
The 2023 Seminar is in its whole my best memory at XWiki.
Matéo with the XWiki team during the 2023 Seminar
