I learned a lot as a full-time Software Engineer at Originate. I worked on three different projects during my time there, and each presented different challenges and new things for me to learn.

My first project involved familiarizing myself with Javascript, Coffeescript, and the Cucumber testing framework. I was brought onto an existing project (written in Coffeescript) that had essentially no feature tests implemented to support it. I was tasked with implementing the first test to begin laying the framework for future tests that aligned with the Cucumber philosophy (feel free to read more here).

My second project involved a mentor giving me a crash course in Android development so that I could work on a customer-facing app for a well known company (We signed an NDA so I cannot disclose more details). My contributions to this project primarily consisted of meticulously formatting the view XMLs to match the specifications of the design mock-ups. At the end of my participation in this project, my mentor told me that he thought the views I made were "the best looking parts of the app".

The final project began with me learning the React framework for Javascript. After I learned the basics online, I began an independent project that monitored the GitHub activity for our company's organization, filtered by contributor username to record only the developers in my office, and then displayed various stats in real-time on a colorful React-based frontend that used the material-design-ui library.

During this summer, I was one of four interns at this Amex office. Our goal was to improve the testing situation. Initially, we all worked on a server that would provide stored responses for testing purposes, rather than getting test responses via their faulty test network. Then after a few weeks I branched off (along with one other intern) into what I would spend the majority of the summer working on: automated UI tests for the Amex iOS app. At the beginning of the summer, Amex didn't have a UI test suite at all for iOS. This meant that my team was not only adding new tests, but creating and deciding on the entire test code infrastructure. We had rigorous code reviews to ensure that any new code was following convention and using the correct separation of functionality. We used the KIF (Keep it Functional) framework to automate the UI commands. This often required us to dive into the app code and comprehend its functionality so we could add necessary testing identifiers. This gave me more experience with working in an existing codebase, which will be a very necessary skill once I enter the workforce of an existing company.

I spent the summer of 2014 working as a researcher on a team called Middle Years Computer Science, or MyCS. I have to say, this position was a lot of fun. For the first three weeks, I worked with two other students to spruce up Mudd's existing MyCS MOOC. Then the fourth week, the rest of the team arrived and we all went to Lihue, HI to give a workshop to the teachers working there. We had them try out our course and give feedback. Over the next couple of weeks, I worked with two other Mudders and mentored three students who had just graduated high school with no CS experience. We all worked together to create a brand new curriculum to teach kids CS using Arduino. I really enjoyed getting to write code that could operate in the physical world using the Arduino robots. The mentoring aspect of this project was valuable because it gave me experience teaching and explaining technical concepts to people without a technical background in a way they could understand.

My job during the summer of 2013 was to contribute to an existing project called Triangleland. The idea was that Triangleland would be a geometry game designed to let kids learn geometry in a fun and intuitive, visual way, and by doing so come to appreciate the beauty of geometry and math in general. Unfortunately, the project had to be canceled once it ran out of funding, so there is no final product for me to show anyone. I worked in Java, and spent a lot of the summer examining existing code. I was adding functionality for different theorems, which involved understanding and sometimes correcting the code that had been written the summer before. This project made me much more comfortable with Java and with critically examining an existing code base.