Hello! This morning we traveled to Utrecht, another city in the Netherlands. This city has a similar feel to Amsterdam, but with less tourism. We found out it turned 900 years old recently. Apparently we missed the 6-month long party. After arriving in the city, we took the bus to an older, more industrial, area for our company visit for the day. Here, we visited Aurea Imaging.
Aurea Imaging is a small company that works with drones to create solutions for precision farming. This entails finding ways to save resources and money whilst yielding a higher crop/desired result. For example, one of there typical services is analyzing the fruits of orchards. Aurea Imaging will use drones to scan the orchard and turn the data in a visual map. This map will tell a tractor where to spray the necessary trees/cut the necessary roots/etc. The company’s main objective is to produce software for tractors to automate processes. This saves farmers money, time, and yields a higher, more consistent crop. They also work with breeders, however this is a more harder work to generalize, as each job is varies. I found this presentation super interesting as it seems like a relatively simple coding idea (in theory) that drives a unique business. The business is able to approach a farmer and help them produce their product easier and cheaper.
After the presentation, we got a tour of their office and building. The office is in a large campus of other startups. All of which shares a cafeteria, pristine gym, conference rooms, and much more. It was a very impressive tour and seems like a really fun office to work at. Unfortunately, I do not have much to offer in the field of software engineering. However, we did learn about the business techniques, economics, and future plans for the company. It was really cool to hear all of this because it seems so attainable for a student like me to be able to contribute to a company like this.
Next, we walked into the city of Utrecht for a walking tour. As I mentioned, the city is similar to Amsterdam. There are canals, brick streets, and lots of bikes. My favorite part of the tour was the stop at the ice cream shop. I got pistachio and it was delicious (and healthy of course). We also were able to visit a church, garden, and library. Overall, the city is beautiful and I’d love to spend more time there.
To end the day, I plan to get some delicious food at an Italian restaurant. The Dutch seem to suggest getting food that isn’t … Dutch. Something about the lack of seasoning and flavors. Tomorrow we are going to visit another university and then take a canal cruise. I’m looking forward to finally getting on one of the canal boats that we’ve been seeing around the city.
Until then, doei!