Work Term 2

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the Summer 2025 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

During my second work term at Descartes, I had the opportunity to take on more responsibility and contribute to a company-wide application used across the enterprise. I developed core features for the SSO Validation platform, which strengthened my understanding of security compliance in web applications, APIs, and identity providers. Beyond backend development, I worked closely with the UX department to design and refine UI components, improving user interaction flows and making the application more intuitive for developers across teams. This blend of technical development and cross-functional collaboration not only expanded my technical skillset in .NET Core, but also gave me valuable experience in creating software that balances functionality with usability. Overall, this term reinforced my passion for building impactful tools and showed me the importance of collaboration in delivering high-quality solutions.

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!