As I search for more opportunities, I’ve found that it may help if I start creating a small blog about my relevant skills and experience. Below is a timeline of all the work from 2019-2021 that I consider to be relevant to my job search.
Timeline
- August 2019 - December 2019: Start of Senior Capstone Series, learned about Scrum and various frameworks such as React and Flask.
- January 2020 - July 2020: CSPP (Corporate Sponsored Senior Capstone Project)
- July 2020 - August 2020: Internship at RREES and CROSS to work on SkyhookDM
- September 2020: Promotion to Software Engineer II at RREES
- November 2020: Finish Skyhook project Partioner for in memory data storage.
- November 2020 - December 2020: Managed a Senior Capstone Team to work on Full Stack Development; Website redesign and Subscription service
- January 2021 - August 2021: Mentored two interns in Frontend (React, CSS, HTML), Backend (SQL, API, testing), and Firmware (Python, C/C++, Linux OS).
August 2019 - December 2019
It started when I was still in university, finishing up my final year in Computer Science. I had completed starting my own company idea, called RentMyJunk and recruited a team of classmates that were experienced in Frontend, Backend, and Mobile. I took on the role of a Product Owner and we each rotated as Scrum Master to get a feel. In addition, I wrote papers reflecting on the various project management techniques and followed Scrum creating Burndown, Scrum Boards, and Sprint Plans. When it was over, we were able to choose our next project. This time corporate sponsors would visit our class and pitch projects their company is interested in researching and developing that we should use to satisfy our Senior Design Capstone in Software Engineering.
January 2020 - July 2020
For me, I became facinated by the Micro-Grid project pitched by the head of senior design and former dean, Patrick Mantey. The project consisted of a collaboration with the Resilient and Renewable Efficient Energy Systems Labratory (RREES) and working on building from the ground up a new system architecture that would support integrating IoT/hardware developed by EE Graduate Students bringing data accessibility and visuals. For the Microgrid project, I worked primarily as a Backend engineer, creating API endpoints that send queries to our Postgres database to fetch data, and then parsing the response as a json to be used by other applications. Notable features that I implemented were Outage Notifications (Consumer Email Service), User Authenthication (Register, Login), and infrastructure integration (end to end debugging). By the end of the project, we were evaluated by acceptance tests consisting of with multiple professors, TAs, and presented to various companies and stakeholders at Partner’s Day.
July 2020 - August 2020
Over the summer I was honored to be invited to formaly join the research lab as an intern and was a part of the onboarding process and got to interview candidates for our lab. In the previous project, I had familiarized myself with the backend and started to learn more about the Frontend as our frontend member pursued other opportunities. I learned React and went on to work on a side project to create a vertical scaling in cluster/distributed file system datastore. I hired one other intern who worked with me to develop a register page for IoTs, tracking their locations on a map.
September 2020 - December 2020
I became a spokesperson for the lab and overseer of a senior capstone team of five students to complete a website redesign of features focusing on UI/UX. I provided support for calling API endpoints and created resource materials for onboarding. I coordinated meetings between Patrick Mantey and provided weekly updates on the progress towards the website redesign. By the end, the students and faculty were satisfied with the final product which focused on adding a social aspect by adding a profile page with pictures, a subscribe button, and improved theming. Other than management, I worked closely on resolving Firmware bug fixes to prepare the devices for consumer deployment and preparing a plan relating to optimization and sample size as well as created designs for AWS infrastructure in the future to scale up as the company grows.
January 2021 - August 2020
I mentored two new interns who joined our lab. I started off with weekly shadowing sessions where they watched me create new API endpoints for notifications and plenty of testing. I submitted proof of a sucessful MVP through unit testing each endpoint call and response, using curl and Postman. Next, I performed manual integration tests looking at inspect element to confirm the timing and review the webpage styling, then flooded the service using locust to simulate active user behavior. Finally, I created a Github Workflow automation to be run everytime a pull request is submitted to master that checks our code against linters and unit tests. Basically a lot of Operations and Systems Management (Ops).
Outside of mentoring, I worked on researching designs and was inspired by the Windows Update to reinvent semantic versioning for our IoT devices. I created a system service using cronjobs to compare device versions on local and Gitlab (our hosted production server repository) then pull if the versions differed and perform system adjustments depending on whether it was a patch, minor bug, or new release. I worked with our new hardware engineer and onboarding him to test the firmware on multiple variations of devices and created a one time setup script and registry file. Notable features: Waveform Inspection Tool, User Manual, Onboarding Documentation.
Takeaways
During my time working in the R&D team, I’ve gained valulable skills wearing multiple hats that pave the road to a Full-Stack Engineer position, being able to work on Frontend, Backend, and Ops.