A Summer at GBC - A Technical Retrospective
Looking back at the summer of 2026, and sharing some of the lessons and skills I've built working at a schedule one bank
If you read my last post, you know I just wrapped up my first-ever co-op term at the General Bank of Canada! While I already gave a doozy of a shout-out to the amazing people I worked with, I realized I hadn’t actually sat down and talked about the actual work.
I’ll be honest, the learning curve was steep, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. So, let’s dive into the technical side of my summer!
The ITSM Grind & Going Agile
Before this summer, my understanding of ITSM was basically just knowing what the acronym stood for. But getting to see it operate as a core business function was wild. I went from total beginner to resolving over 400+ tickets over the course of the term!
But the coolest part? Getting to finally apply the Agile fundamentals I’d been studying. Participating in daily scrums and managing work through Azure DevOps was huge for me. It bridged the gap between theory and real-world execution.
I’ve done courses in agile methodologies before, but I didn’t realize until I was sitting in a daily scrum meeting listing out all my tasks and asking for advice from my coworkers just how vital these processes can be to a team. It defintely saved my skin a few times, and it made my life alot easier being able to get such an easy interface to contanct people who may not be in the office as much, or to simply get an oppurtunity to as k a silly question to the team everyday!
Security, Stakes, and Major Incidents
Next, and I can’t stress this enough, working in a secured Schedule 1 bank environment is no joke. You can’t just cowboy your way through production; every single system change has serious weight and requires rigorous security considerations.
This really hit home when I got to help resolve a major incident. It was a massive learning moment, especially regarding the importance of customer-facing communication. You can fix the back-end infrastructure all you want, but if the end-users are left in the dark, the service is still failing.
I’ve seen so many reels and memes about what it feels like living in the moments where systems are not operating as expected, and your users are having a not great time, and there’s a distinct lack of information from the sources that should definetly have the most information! Getting to actually sit down through an experience like that, sitting through a meeting where we discussed potential disaster recovery options, although was not a discussion that I felt was something I had a lot of input on, was still something that I felt very interested to learn about and see more into the processes that keep technical infrastruture able to maintain that extra 9.
Automating the Boring Stuff
Now, for my absolute favourite part of the term: automation. We had an onboarding/offboarding process in Freshservice that was begging for an overhaul. I took the initiative to redesign the process, focusing heavily on building better documentation and tying in automation workflows directly to our on-prem infrastructure.
This project also led to a massive first for me: writing my very first Ansible playbook! Combine that with learning how to actually deploy pipelines, and I finally felt like I was piecing together how enterprise infrastructure actually runs behind the scenes.
All in all, the technical growth I experienced was incredible, and I’m super excited to bring these new infrastructure and Agile skills into my future projects.