In my brief time at Flexport I was able to contribute towards the reduction of trucking overcharge by over 50%. I first improved back-end integrations our procurement database. This allowed for better and stricter invoice validations on the frontend and backend, resulting in the number of charges with bad rates to be reduced from over 60% of all charge to under 15%.

Aside from general frontend and backend tasks, I was able to contribute in designing systems and analyzing data as well. I designed and implemented an end-to-end document upload system which would allow for proof of charge document requirements. Just as well, I developed queries for an analytics dashboard to assess invoicing accuracy and leakage using Snowflake. I also participated in the data analysis from the dashboard to identify critical areas of overcharge.

My experience as a software engineer at Flexport, however short, was valuable in allowing me to experience the fast-paced environment of a software engineer and the expectations that come with that. I was able to learn a lot about the software and freight forwarding industries, as well as have a more impactful role than I could have had in my internship. As a full time software engineer, I had to not just learn and implement things with minimal guidance, but make impactful design decisions and communicate with stakeholders to ensure the best possible outcomes.

On the technical side, I learned much more about all the technologies involved: React, Ruby, Rails, GraphQL, Apollo, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, S3, and more. It amazes me just the difference one year since my internship makes in my ability to understand and implement these technologies, and I am excited to see how much more I can learn in the future.

Technologies: React, JavaScript, Flow, Ruby on Rails, GraphQL Ruby, Apollo Client, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, S3

During this internship, I owned a support form integration feature end-to-end, heavily refactoring the feature in one application and adding an implementation in another, allowing better user experience and reduced complexity when modifying the support form.

Through this internship structure, I was able to better myself as a software engineer both in my personal skills and as part of a team. I participated in daily and weekly SCRUM meetings, organized communications between stakeholders of the support feature, and efficiently gather requirements and recommendations for the feature.

Simultaneously, I was able to learn and operate mostly autonomously on a day-to-day basis, learning new technologies and developing the support feature, with my teammates and manager answering any questions if I became stuck.

Technologies: React, JavaScript, Flow, Ruby on Rails, NextJS, GraphQL

The focus of this internship was to develop two internal tools to aid in process improvement and budget forecasting for organization executives at NASA Technology Transfer. My manager did not have experience with software development and was simply the stakeholder from which I got feedback about the performance and ease of use of the tools.

Although this structure made it difficult to clearly ascertain requirements at times, it significantly helped me develop my software development skills precisely because of that. It also allowed me to develop skills of learning on the fly, as many of the technologies used in the dashboards I was unfamiliar with at the time.

For the conclusion of this internship, I had to present my progress and acheivements through an organization wide presentation. Here I was able to use my skills developed from previous Communication Intensive courses at LSU such as my introductory Honors course or my Object-Oriented Programming course. These, combined with the feedback I got from supervisors and colleagues, led to me to have a very successful closing presentation and satisfactory conclusion to the internship.

Technologies: Python, Anaconda, Jupyter Notebook, Pandas, SQLite, Plotly

Working towards development of a research project such as this has both allowed me to contribute meaningfully towards the development of autonomous robotic systems, but also develop learning, presentation, technical reading, and technical writing skills through the process of my thesis and with the help of my thesis director and lab supervisor.

Technologies: ROS, OpenCV, Python, NumPy, C++

Since 2019, I have mentored FIRST Robotics Competition Team 8044 Denham Venom from their inception, teaching students various programming and robotics skills and leading them through applying these skills to their competition robots, even winning an Autonomous Award at the 2022 Tallahassee Regional event.

As I recently moved, I am no longer able to mentor the team, but I am still in contact, and have begun mentoring team 7461 Sushi Squad in a similar capacity.

As a team lead I was responsible for the organization and project management of the project. I was able to keep the group members on task and clearly define their roles and responsibilities, while also organizing meeting and project management software for the team.

We used GitHub projects as a project management software, and at weekly meetings we would close old tickets then create and assign new ones. I also drafted milestone reports which would then be reviewed and edited by the team members.

The most important aspect of this project from a project management perspective is communication between the team members. Due to the fast paced nature of game development, without good communication, heavy refactoring and bug-fixing could be needed for what should be simple feature merges.

For this, we decided to use Trello as our project management software which allowed us to easily visualize everyone's progress in a glance. Also, biweekly progress meetings were set up to coordinate development of assets, the game world, and scripts. Finally a version control strategy known as GitHub flow was implemented which allows each person to work independently and any changes to be rectified by both parties whose code conflicts.