Work Term 1

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, I had the amazing opportunity of interning as a Software Developer at Descartes Systems Group. I had the chance to work on web applications for customers, and infrastructure for our team. The majority of my work involved front-end development and user-interfaces.

EMPLOYER

Descartes Systems Group is a Waterloo based company that was co-founded by co-ops from the University of Waterloo. They focus on providing highly scalable and secure logistics and supply chain productivity solutions to other businesses. Specifically, I interned with the Research and Development team (RANDD). RANDD is a very special team at Descartes. There is a huge co-op culture there, many full-time members of the team, coming out of co-op programs themselves, knew how to help us, the current co-ops, settle into the team and make the most of our work terms.

GOALS

Previously, I had self-taught myself web development via Udemy Courses, reading lots of documentation, and building a few small web applications. My goal for this work term was to reinforce and improve upon my web development skills by working on professional, production grade, software.

JOB DESCRIPTION

As a key member of the core Software Development team, your responsibilities include:

• Creating and supporting the platform of software products and services.
• Designing and building innovative solutions that can solve complex problems in the real-time, high volume, transactional multi-tenant SOA/SaaS environment.
• Coding new projects and maintain existing projects, while adhering to software development policies Enhancing the usability and performance of applications and services.
• Developing proof of concepts for web based applications.
• Participating in code reviews and recommend/implement improvements.
• Diagnosing issues with applications and suggesting appropriate courses of action to remedy the problems.

CONCLUSION

Before starting at Descartes, I was anxious to find out how my first work term experience was going to be like. What if I don't perform well? What if I'm not as skilled as my manager expected and can't do the work I'm assigned? What if... All of the overthinking and pessimistic thoughts made me feel out of place.

In some ways, I think this shows how much I cared about this opportunity. I didn't want to waste it so I put everything I could into it. To my surprise, the stories I've heard from my friends about their negative experiences with their internships and managers didn't apply to me at all. I, and the other co-ops were immediately taken in as a part of the team, and throughout the semester, had the chance to work on and learn about what interested us.

I honed and enhanced my web development skills, learned the importance and applications of cyber security in web applications, and worked on creating user-friendly and fluid interfaces. For a large portion of my work-term, I worked on implementing data visualization controls for our team. I refreshed our Pie, Bar, and Line chart controls and provided pages on the company demo application that demonstrate the implementation of these controls. I also worked on porting an old version of one of our applications to match our latest standards, including user-experience, styling, and moving over the app from .NET Framework 4.8 to .NET Core 8.0. Overall, it was the ideal work term and I can't wait to be back at Descartes in the summer!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work term was truly amazing thanks to the "co-op wrangler" Timothy Nigh, my mentor Jess Cao, my manager Chris Behrendt, and I should literally name every other person on our team here as well because they probably helped me at some point or another (I actually did initially but I don't want to put everyones name online just in case they didn't want that). Thanks team!