At a high level, the service I was working on was to consolidate risk/fraud data in one dashboard for our team to assess risk in a timely fashion. I had to wire our application with our in-house authentication services and follow the OAuth2.0 and OIDC standard protocols. We also had an in-house API gateway service and session management which I integrated in our service. Our security model was role-based and I was in charge of setting up the user-role data model and management for this application.

I was also responsible for creating the GraphQL framework in our application to plumb data from several different services and databases. This involved resolving downstream dependency issues, creating and refactoring RPCs, and configuring the access rules for our service. With this work, we were able to produce an end-to-end product which gave us key risk data in one place.

Lastly, I noticed a very inefficient query coming from one of our microservices. We were performing very resource intensive aggregations on the query in one of the RPCs. I proposed a database design change where we had an aggregate data table which would be updated incrementally by our main application rather than the old design of dumping raw data into a datastore and computing these values each time. Although my internship ended before I was able to see the full impact of my change, this design laid the foundation for our data aggregator which could be applied to several other use cases in the company.

In my first term at BDO, I worked on an internal tool used for resource management with 2 other coop students and 1 full time developer. I was responsible for application support including many bug fixes and several new features. I implemented a profitability calculator where I was responsible for creating the UI, data models and API endpoints. I also implemented an audit trail feature that tracks all actions that affect the database and I created a corresponding record-based security framework.

Towards the end of my first internship, I was asked to also build an email automation tool that employees would use to send invoices to all clients. Since we had several hundred clients, manually sending out these emails would take an entire weekend. I designed a basic UI that allows the user to select a template, verify the email list and select an email signature. Using this tool, we were able to decrease the invoice email process to under 20 minutes total.

In my second internship, I was given the opportunity to take more ownership of a project when I joined a data mining project as the primary developer. I was given the freedom to design the database schema, build the backend data models and create the API endpoints. I was also in charge of configuring multitenancy for commercial use and a role-based security framework.

The API microservice was built to replace a deprecated third-party service that we used to retrieve data about some of the machine models that Uptake provides services for. The new service needed to use a new third party API and transform the response data to match the old model in an efficient and reliable way. Some of the challenges included finding the appropriate mappings, handling missing data and lazy loading since the API call was very heavy and expensive.

While I was at Uptake, they had separate applications for each client, and were in the process of migrating to a shared cloud platform for easier support and development. I was in charge of restoring 2 of these applications which were written in old frameworks and configuring the CI/CD so that they could run on the cloud servers. The main challenge was sifting through legacy code which had poor documentation and trying to replicate the behaviour using a more modern stack. While it was difficult, it forced me to have a much deeper understanding of the business objectives of the product during development.

The other thing I had to do was help develop a new security framework. Since the applications needed to be used by multiple clients, we needed to support multitenancy and we created a role-based security framework which applied the appropriate access rules to the different parts of the product. I created and seeded the required tables in the database, and configured the access protocols in the frontend to hide the unauthorized features.

One of my first tasks was to optimize the data validation jobs, since they were taking a large chunk of the weekend to run. The core issue was that we had SQL stored procedures which were running serially and not using the resources efficiently. By configuring the stored procedures to run in parallel and applying the corresponding backend changes, the runtime of the data validation jobs was decreased by over 50%.

Another task of mine was to support 3 applications through the upgrade of one of our third-party vendors. I had to rewrite a lot of functionality to work from a console application in the .NET Core framework so that it was compatible with the new changes. In the process, I was able to find some redundant parts of the workflow and proposed some changes to automate the functionality of some of our manual jobs. Part of this upgrade was configuring some jobs as scheduled ECS tasks in AWS. I had to configure the permissions using ansible files and configure the listener rules to control the traffic.

One of the most difficult and fulfilling parts of this job is catering the lessons to the students strengths, weaknesses and programming goals. Some of my students want to learn programming for game or web development, whereas others want to learn for the purpose of pursuing STEM related fields in high school and postsecondary. Depending on their weaknesses and goals, this shapes the types of projects I choose to help them with to boost their learning and get the most out of the lessons.

Some types of projects I have helped my students with include basic games like Tic Tac Toe, Connect Four and Hangman, as well as interactive console applications such as an implementation of a bank and a grade manager for teachers. These projects help combine the core computer science fundamentals such as classes, functions, loops and basic data structures.

The last aspect of the job is trial lessons. Geek Education offers a free trial lesson for all students to decide if they want to pursue the lessons. I give a dry run of the introductory lesson and encourage the students to sign up. This is notable experience for me because I am directly involved in the business/sales aspect and it is important for me to give a lesson which is both enjoyable and an appropriate level of difficulty.