Over the summer of 2016, I participated in an internship with a company in San Diego. I didn’t get the chance to post the weekly blogs I created for a class that focused on the internship experience, and I feel like it would help to post them here. Maybe some might find it helpful to read and reflect on, but it has definitely shaped how I am as a software engineer at this moment. In the future, I hope to post comments or updates to see how much I have changed since then, and even reflect on how technology has changed.

Hello!

My name is Pedro Villaroman. I am a fourth year computer science major looking to specialize in software engineering, project management and project design. A few of my favorite courses so far, especially in regards to the subjects I am interested in, are CSE136 (Enterprise Applications by Thomas Powell), CSE170 (Human-Computer Interaction by Scott Klemmer) and COGS121 (Data Visualization by Nadir Weibel). I highly recommend these courses if you are looking to learn more about software engineering through classes at UCSD.

I will be working at Verint here in San Diego for the duration of the summer (June 20th to September 16). I will be working with the Workforce Optimization product which is designed to “help organization of all sizes reduce operating costs, identify revenue opportunities and competitive advantages, and improve performance, profitability, and the customer experience”. Specifically, I will be working on rebuilding the UX and UI of the product with React and Redux as well as building standardized RESTful APIs and contributing system tests to cover a wide range of the legacy code.

Before the internship, I will be looking into React and Redux and getting a feel for how the technologies work with web development. Also, I will be reading up on standardized RESTful APIs like http://jsonapi.org/. This is especially relevant because of the increase of API-first development that companies are starting to adhere to.

By the end of my internship, I would hope to have learned a lot more about how the internet and browsers work to really take full advantage of the tools and tricks that are offered and build secure and performance-driven applications. I also want to be able to learn more about the development life cycle and find every advantage I can to become a successful project manager.

Good luck to everyone!