SDE 1

I just started this role, I will keep you in the loop 😎

Internship

I designed, defended and implemented a system architecture over 6 months to analyse a given team's on-call alerts. This service was infinitely extensible for its clients - as they were able to create simple serverless functions to enrich the data ingested by my service. This data would then feed a dashboard, which comes with automatic insights and data-driven suggestions. This saved at least 2 hours weekly of manual data processing by senior engineers in every team that leverages it. I owned the CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and validation of this cloud-based application.

I also got a taste of working on Aurora Platform. I developed a small piece of infrastructure required for IPv6. This work aided multiple services running under the Aurora brand, such as Aurora Postgres and Aurora Serverless.

I got to experience what it is like to be on a highly mature team full of talent - especially ones that don't often agree. I learned about how to ensure large-scale programs continue to be functional, healthy, and easy to maintain. I learned these best practices and am delighted to carry them forward throughout my career.

Tutor

In CSE, I led classes of 25 students twice a week. I guided students through COMP1531. This is a group-work course, targeting skills such as communication and familiarity with software engineering tools such as git and JavaScript. Ran 1 hour tutoring sessions to cover core concepts and answer questions on software engineering development. I also had the privilege to write course exams sat by 700 students, and managed student queries regarding it over a 24 hour exam block.

I also taught COMP6991, a course covering Rust and language design generally.

This experience was by far the most impactful on me. It taught me how to interact with large groups of different people, manage conflict, foster cohesion, and express complex requirements that are suited to the experience of different students.

Graduate Engineer

When I came back after my graduation, Nine's data team had expanded the small ambitions for local development into a new code-first approach. This involved some of my old work in local development, as well as a larger ambition to incorporate techniques like containerisation and IaC to create further isolation and better cloud management. I worked on documenting and provisioning project sets for teams to have their own isolated environments. This would further improve the agility of teams as they no longer need to share cloud resources (their locks, dependencies or repositories).

This also significantly reduced complexity for any given data engineer. I worked on providing CI/CD tooling templates that can be quickly spun up by client teams, and worked on scalability concerns for my own team. I leveraged parallelism to reduce this concern and migrated our products to be runnable in the base environment - making sure teams can spin it up easily using their own resources.

In the case of shared resources like BigQuery compute slots, I aided in ensuring hygienic use by users - building a monitoring service which ensures no user is using too many resources.

Overall, I worked in the DevOps space to level up team agility. I worked directly with teams to learn and implement exactly what features they would need from Google cloud platform - and more importantly what was slowing them down. We made elegant abstractions to give them all the configuration they need, and nothing more.

Internship

I helped in the collection and analysis of data from applications ranging from the SMH, the Age, and 9Now. user events such as page views, user stories and page events were triggered in a systematic way from various differing applications and tech stacks.

I also started and handed off a project over 1 month to re-architect a data team's infrastructure in GCP by leveraging Composer and Docker, to support local development and to deliver cost savings and reliability improvements. This led to dramatic speedups in our development iteration cycles, which would take at least 5 minutes previously to run the most basic tests. These iteration cycles would have to be made to make any code changes. They were now a minute at most, and are isolated from the changes being made by other engineers in the same environment - providing more stability to shared development resources.

Most importantly, I got to meet some incredible engineers who were driven by both innovation and product improvement. I was inspired by the work done at nine to balance the needs of the business to the needs of the engineers. I saw how to effectively communicate with people from diverse fields.

Internship

I developed product features using a Java micro-service back-end and Angular.js front-end with thorough review and testing processes. I also developed an internal tool written in React and Express for observing environment health and status.

I saved hours of manual testing time, and saved hours of outage diagnosis time during incidents involving the team. I also managed back-end, front-end, and deployment of this full stack application to AWS. I also refactored large Java projects for more efficient deployments to better leverage serverless tools on AWS. The project would fail due to memory or resourcing issues previously, but now no longer suffers these problems as our datasets scaled.

More importantly however, this was my first full-time job. ResMed taught me the way a sprint works, how to review other people's code, and how to receive reviews in a professional setting. I also learned JavaScript, React and angularJS on the job, teaching me how to learn and iterate quickly on new concepts. I was able to do it with the guidance of smart and patient software engineers at all levels at ResMed.