In college, one of my most motivated and personable friends (Rachel) came to me with an idea for a party planning app and a brochure for a startup competition our school was hosting. So I joined as the developer and made a prototype of the app using React Native and AWS Amplify over the next few months. We ended up in the finals but didn't win (despite being the only team with a product prototype; our mentor was outraged). I thought that was the end of that but then, days before I was scheduled to start my first job, I was laid off. So I went back to Rachel, who was still pushing forward with Nightly and joined back in trying to get the app (web and mobile, plus a company site) to a point where we could start getting users for testing. This time I was also working with a consultant Rachel had hired to handle the interactive invite creator (a core feature I didn't have a clue how to make) and another college friend who helped improve the UI/UX. I stayed with this another six months or so before taking my job as a developer for the Penn-CHOP Microbiome Program.
HPE GreenLake is a big confusing service that essentially enables companies with existing data centers or computing resources to create an internal or hybrid cloud to leverage the benefits of the cloud computing model. The summer after my Junior year in college I interned with a team under the GreenLake umbrella that was in charge of a large scale data migration project, the gist of which was taking data from HPE servers and devices all over the world and funneling them into centralized sources. The pipeline for doing this was enourmously complex, needing to handle the scale and also be dynamic enough to work with all the different types of incoming data and be manipulable as it works. I spent most of my time working as a member of a particular scrum team on this project. At one point I helped to implement an AST for parsing the pipeline DSL into a database agnostic form. At another I struggled to keep up with K, the resident pipeline expert, on a deep dive into category theory to build out some of the core flexibility of the transfer layer.
Owl Labs is a rapidly growing startup that creates Meeting Owls, center-of-table camera/mic/speakers that provide a panoramic view of a meeting room as well as zooming in on active speakers. I interned with them the summer after my Freshman year of college to create a unit testing framework for their codebase. I wasn't at all familiar with embedded code or test frameworks at the time so most of my time was spent in learning but I did end up with a test suite using GTest and comprising a few tests for circular image handling code (testing was later expanded by people who knew the codebase better than me). The next winter I contracted briefly with them again, this time creating a couple internal utility websites for inventory management tasks.
HepatoChem is a very small chem-tech startup that creates biomimetic screening kits for clients to rapidly test a particle of interest against a wide array of complex chemical reactions. I interned with them as a Junior and Senior in high school, working with the CEO to create a reliable and user friendly inventory management system using MS Access. I migrated the data from spreadsheets they were using and then created forms and macros for common tasks, including compiling saftey data sheets for any kit, which had previously been an annoying manual task.
