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Ernst & Young

Overview

Ernst & Young is the third-largest professional services firm in the world, providing audit, tax, and consulting services to clients in virtually every industry. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I had my internship, EY is the largest of the "Big 4" firms and serves mostly tech and biotech companies.

As a Core Business Intern in the San Francisco office, I work with a variety of client engagement teams to analyze financial documents and update revenue risk controls for tech companies, primarily Apple, Facebook, and HP Enterprise.

Experience

The internship was fantastic. I had total freedom over the teams I worked with and the projects I took on. Everyone at EY is incredibly friendly and there are tons of resources to help you succeed.

Being a computer science student, I was super excited to work with EY's tech clients. Specifically, I commuted down to the South Bay to work with Apple, Facebook, and HP Enterprise.

The work varied from team to team, but it mostly revolves around dealing with financial documents and reviewing/setting up risk controls. I can't go more in-depth than that (to preserve client confidentiality), but I can say that I learned a lot about the financial, auditing, and supply chain aspect of business.

In addition to working with client teams, I spent significant time as part of EY's College MAP program. It's a company-sponsored mentoring initiative that provides underrepresented students with the mentoring and assistance they need to achieve their academic goals. My involvement took the form of setting up summer opportunities at universities in California where students could gain STEM exposure before entering college. I worked as a volunteer tutor for over 6 years, so it was great that I was able use my passion for helping students as part of my internship.

What I Learned

I learned a ton about how massive tech companies operate behind the scenes. Analyzing financial reports and setting up risk controls taught me about the business side of tech.

I also learned how to work in teams more effectively. Every day I had the opportunity to learn, grow, and connect with brilliant people from a variety of positions and backgrounds. Being a part of EY's diverse team helped me sharpen my communication skills and better empathize with the people around me.

Ultimately, that's one of the biggest lessons I've gained from my time with EY: it's all about the people. Even though EY is a global, $30B/year company, I always felt that I was making an impact when I walked into work. That's made a significant impression on me, and I plan to continue making an impact with my future work.

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H.E.P. Materials

Overview

H.E.P. Materials is a building material supply company with a lot of custom software. Their engineering team supports their entire network of stores, warehouses, and internal tools. I was a software engineering intern at their main office in Geneva, NY during the summer of 2015.

Experience

I worked alongside a full-time software engineer for the duration of my internship. He showed me how to work with the company's tools, answered my many questions, and help me understand what "real world" software engineering entails.

I wasn't assigned a specific project to work on, but I was encouraged to explore the company and find something to improve. After poking around for a few days, I decided to improve the web app used to get item information from the company's warehouses.

The web app is used hundreds of times a day to confirm inventory, track down vendors, and verify orders. It's most commonly used to locate items within the warehouses, and the app is usually accessed via employees' smartphones.

Work

I decided that the best way to make an impact was to meet with the users of the system and see how it could be improved. After speaking with a few employees and using the application myself, it became clear that there were two major usability issues with the web app:

• Looking up an item's information takes too long

• Navigating the interface on a small screen is cumbersome

The program took well over 10 seconds to load, and when it did, the interface wasn't responsive to small screens. Warehouse employees were spending 20+ seconds every time they needed to look up an item's information, which is both annoying and inefficient.

I spent a lot of time understanding the syntax and structure of the code base. After poking around for a while, I realized that the application was writing inventory items to a log file before allowing the user to submit a query. That wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't logging hundreds of thousands of them.

Apparently, that part of the application was maintained by an employee that no longer worked at the company, and since the other engineers weren't actually in the warehouses using the app, nobody had noticed the overhead it caused. Essentially, I had discovered the root of the program's inefficiency.

My mentor was thrilled to see what I found, and told me they didn't even need the data since they were already logging it via other means. I removed the unneeded code and the load time of the application jumped down from over 10 seconds to about 1 second.

Later on, I ended up creating an even more optimized web app in Ruby on Rails, which plugged in nicely with the company's new MySQL database.

And just like that, the first major issue of my project was solved! The next step was making the user interface mobile-friendly. I was a big fan of the Bootstrap CSS framework at the time, so I went with that. H.E.P. Materials has its own UI element styling, so I just ended up borrowing Bootstrap's grid system to lend some structure to the front end.

The team ended up loving the Bootstrap grid so much that they asked me to implement it into their internal website as well! The site was mostly just a portal for their services and software, but they were spending a lot of time formatting their content to look good on mobile. Using Bootstrap's system let them spend less time on formatting and more on other projects.

What I Learned

This was my first software engineering internship, and I was amazed at how much I was able to contribute. Being able to spot a bug and speed up a core piece of software was a huge accomplishment, and the engineering team was incredibly helpful and supportive throughout all of it.

I learned a lot about what it's like to be a developer in the "real world". When I was trying to figure out what was making the web app so slow, I thought I'd be able to fix the problem in a few hours. Instead, I ended up spending over a week just learning enough FoxPro (the language it was written in) to understand what was even going on.

I also learned how important it is to step outside your bubble. The only reason the inefficiency in the code had persisted for so long is because nobody from the engineering team was using that application day-to-day. Because I talked with the employees in the warehouses about their frustrations with the software, I was able to find and fix a pain point for them.

Overall, my experience was fantastic. I learned a lot about debugging code, working in a real-world environment, and finding ways to improve existing systems.

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LUCK Studio

Website: luck.studio.

Overview

LUCK is a web design and development agency that builds custom web applications for startups and small businesses. The projects I work on vary wildly depending on the client, but it's been an even split between design work and full-on development. I'm able to handle the workload on my own most of the time, but I do occasionally bring on some friends to help out with larger projects, or when my class schedule gets too hectic.

10% of our profits are donated to the Children's Scholarship Fund of New York, which gives financial support low-income students to pursue their academic goals. I've volunteered as an academic tutor for over 5 years, so I've seen the importance access to education plays in the success of kids. My college schedule has made it hard to stay as active as I once was, so this is my way of still contributing toward a cause I'm extremely passionate about.

My experience as a tutor for low-income students has shown me the critical role education plays in laying the foundation for a successful future. LUCK Studio is an opportunity for me to combine my passion for entrepreneurship and technology and use it to have a meaningful impact in the lives of students in need.

What I'm Learning

LUCK Studio was my first experience with entrepreneurship, and it's an ongoing learning experience. There's a lot of work that goes into managing clients, keeping track of progress, and building digital products while also juggling school and other ventures.

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Feather UI

Overview

Feather is a free, open source framework for building beautiful user interfaces. As I've gotten more involved with web technologies, I noticed myself searching for a framework that met my needs. Bootstrap is the go-to choice, but the styling is too bland for the websites I design, not to mention its sheer size makes it cumbersome for smaller projects.

The Solution

I built my own UI framework!

Everything — from the CSS grid system to the notification JavaScript functions — has been written from scratch. The upside is that unlike Bootstrap, Feather provides much livelier responsive elements alongside a much cleaner syntax. There's no reliance on JQuery, there's only 2 files to include, and the document structure is much more flexible.

The Future

The first version of Feather has launched! Right now, the core of HTML is supported, and my plan is to expand the framework with more styling options for components (navbars, card, etc.).

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Drazzard

Overview

Drazzard is an arcade-style video game where the player must survive waves of enemies, collecting health and mana potions along the way. I built the project in a few months on top of the fantastic Love2D framework with my own menu system, enemy AI, and collision detection.

The game is totally open-source, and you can find all the code here on GitHub.

Challenges

The main hurdle during the development of the game was the fact that I had almost no knowledge about development when I started. My only prior experience came from high school programming classes, but that was entirely text-based. It was a little intimidating jumping into a graphics-heavy project as my first independent project, but I knew that it would be a phenomenal learning experience.

The learning curve was steep at first, but with enough time I got the hang of using Lua and Love2D. At a certain point, my challenges shifted from "how do I do this?" to "how can I do this better?". I was figuring out how to create menu systems, collision detection, etc, but it was all very inefficient.

I started learning about where the overhead was coming from and tried different tactics to optimize the game. I came up with some solutions (like only drawing tiles that are on the screen) that ended up having a major effect on the frame rate and overall performance of the game.

What I Learned

Obviously I learned a lot about the Lua language, graphics, and game logic, but I also learned a lot about the development process as a whole. When I initially created this project (during winter of my freshman year of college), I had no experience completing a project entirely on my own. My only exposure to building software was through school assignments.

Working on this game showed me that there's a lot that goes into creating software, even a relatively straightforward game like Drazzard. There's the actually game mechanics, but then there's also a menu system, collision detection, pathfinding, optimizations, etc.

I also learned a lot about how to learn without a professor. Going in to the project, I had no idea how to program in Lua, how to set up collision detection, or how to even organize the game's structure. I spent a lot of time reading documentation and forum posts in order to actually make progress on the project.

Going Forward

If I had to remake Drazzard knowing what I know now, it would be an entirely different game. I would focus on laying out the structure before I start coding, and build it in a much more modular way.

And who know? Maybe my next winter break will lead to Drazzard 2...