port2Pod
1) The Project
During the summer of 2015 I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to intern at Hewlett Packard’s Vancouver site in Washington State. There I worked under the R&D IT division to develop a Web application tool from the ground up. The tool was essentially a blueprint map of each pod (or more commonly known as cubical) and display each ethernet port information, but more importantly who is sitting there. I also implemented an efficient way to update the information, which was to submit a csv file to the server and it would refresh the database with the new data. This would speed up the responsiveness of the R&D IT team, because a problem that slowed down the process was locating all information per the specific employee.
2) What’s Your Role
For this project, I had to wear many different hats. At first, I was a researcher looking for which technology would suit my problem and then studying to utilize these languages. I then switched hats to a DBA and struggled with how to implement a schema that would fit my solution. After that had been done the backend server which was a Django server hosted on Gunicorn and proxied by NGINX had been relatively straight forward. Lastly the difficult part was translating the data in the PostgreSql database to a visually interactive application. For this I turned to D3.js to draw and handle all the events of the front-end side of my application. Because the pods were not symmetrically placed out and were not 90 degree squares it was a real challenge. Fortuitously I added two columns to my tables and D3 would know which shape to draw and where according to which tuple it was reading.
3) The Experience
This was a very eye-opening experience to the realm of full stack development. Although I was the only developer on this application, I gained experience in communicating with a client, especially one was not overly familiar with the technology. Another important lesson I learned was that as a software engineer a great skill to have is to find the resources to solve a problem. At a big company, the best resource for a challenging problem is other engineers. The senior engineers have a wealth of knowledge. Learning the interpersonal skill to find mentors and colleagues will rapidly increase your growth.