Amazon

June 2019 - September 2019 | Software Development Engineering Intern

I spent the summer in Santa Cruz on the Amazon SellerMobile team, working with their internal mobile application platform to build a new reusable component currently used throughout their SellerMobile app used by hundreds of thousands of merchants around the world.

I had 12 weeks to go through the whole software development process, from learning their internal tools, to discussing my intern project, to implementation, iteration, and testing. I had a little bit of Android and Java experience from high school robotics, but I picked up a lot of skills in the summer development on 3 different platforms: Android, iOS (Objective-C), and the team's Java backend. Initially, my project seemed simple enough to complete, but I quickly learned the difficulties of navigating gigantic codebases; I had to update the legacy component with modern functionality while fitting it into existing code, and implement my project as generically as possible so it can be customized and reused.

The agile experience complemented and contrasted with the system I brought to my committee (see: Circle K International District Technology Chair). We had standup daily as well as retro and sprint planning meetings, whereas the committee was spread out across California and would go days without communication. As slow as some 8-hour workdays were, the summer flew past and I learned a lot. I find myself thinking and coding in a bigger context, paying more detail to coding style and planning things out (now that I've come face-to-face to paying technical debt at my internship).

Social Sciences Computing

June 2018 - Present | Student Programmer

Social Sciences Computing is responsible for websites and servers used by thousands of students and faculty in and out of the Social Sciences department. As a student programmer, I completed day-to-day assigned tasks, including setting up a LEMP-Wordpress server, testing site evaluation tools, and improving websites using Wordpress, HTML/CSS/JS, and PHP.

Since November 2018, we have been developing a Hate Crime Map that allows people to submit reports of hate crime, which goes through a verification process, then visualize that data. The previous project owner left off on a bare-bones working prototype with a ReactJS front-end, ExpressJS back-end, and PostgreSQL database, hosted on Heroku. Moving forward with the professors and project partners, we are tasked with realizing and implementing a useful filter and visualization method

Circle K International

April 2019 - Present | District Technology Chair

With experience on the first Technology committee the previous year, I brought a strong perspective to this year's Technology chair position. Although I liked to work on the projects themselves, the chair position lends itself to more of a product manager role, between communicating with the rest of the District Board members and working with 9 of my own committee members split into 4 tracks: website, data, UI/UX, and software. It is a huge learning experience to be able to implement and practice agile and to lead a committee.

Besides holding meetings and all the administrative stuff involved in chairing a committee, I plan and delegate the work the committee does: updating the District Website, collecting and analyzing district data, building a new mobile app, continuing the MRF Portal project, etc. It is like a unique start-up culture, since we still exist as part of a large collegiate community service organization with 1-year position terms, but fuse it with technology. With our main responsibility being only the District Website, we are free to explore our interests and learning potentials as well as the pain-points in the organization that can use improvement and innovation.

May 2018 - April 2019 | District Software Developer

As the first year of California-Nevada-Hawaii Circle K's Technology Committee, the software developers discussed potential technologies that can improve efficiency throughout the district. We brainstormed and tackled a project to facilitate data flow. The Monthly Report Form Portal aims to establish organization in the monthly process of over 40 secretaries gathering data (member service hours, funds raised for charities, etc.), filling out Excel sheets, and emailing them to the District Secretary.

I worked on the front-end, using Angular 2+ to provide a user interface for the data handled by the back-end built on NodeJS and MongoDB. During the summer, from June-August, I prototyped a working concept with Angular Material. The next step was to improve the user interface, so I implemented cleaner mockups and discussed ways to make using the software, from sign-up to data submission, as intuitive and simple as possible for a general member. Github Project

April 2018 - April 2019 | Technology Chair

The Technology Chair of UCLA Circle K is mainly responsible for maintaining the club website and creating weekly presentations for general body meetings. As the website I came into the term with was bloated on Wordpress (and even gave 500 loading errors sporadically), I worked with my subcommittee to build a completely new one---a MERN stack on a blank droplet on Digital Ocean. Having used a MEAN stack (MongoDB-Express-Angular-NodeJS) for the Monthly Report Form Portal described above, it was not too daunting inserting React into the pack. Plus, we used frameworks such as KeystoneJS (a Content Management System for Node) and NextJS (a server-side rendering framework) to speed up the development process.

Quickly, I turned my focus to allowing my committee members to learn, rather than doing everything myself. I fell into a habit of organizing thing to fix/update/implement on the website and delegating to particular interests; my interest leaned a bit more toward back-end so I implemented most of the REST API and routing/database logic. I decided to expand this attitude to more than the website developers, so I replaced the notion of "subchairs" with "Website, Media, and Projects Teams" to facilitate a real work experience on a team with a particular goal: to learn and to create the image of the club. Switching my attention from building a website to building a team allowed the club to tackle multiple things at once, such as media for meetings and a mobile application for more accessible updates.

Upsilon Pi Epsilon

April 2018 - Present | Member

I inducted into this Computer Science honor society my first year, Spring of 2018. The organization emphasizes personal growth and connecting with high achieving individuals. As a member, I attend professional development events and also tutor. Tutoring is my favorite part of UPE because I enjoy helping others succeed, particularly if I can give advice from my own personal experiences.

VSU HOPE

October 2017 - March 2018 | Intern

The Vietnamese Student Union is a cultural organization at UCLA, and HOPE (Higher Opportunity Program for Education) is its outreach component. Volunteers attend weekly "site" and tutor/mentor/peer advise/host workshops at one of 3 high schools: Westminster HS, San Gabriel HS, or Gardenia HS. The internship aimed to help with the inner workings of HOPE as well as develop culturally-aware leaders. In our weekly intern meeting we discussed various topics related to Vietnamese heritage, including the history of HOPE and why it is necessary, the refugee experience and underprivileged displaced communities, and affirmative action.

HateCrimeMap

November 2018 - Present | Social Sciences Computing

A web interface to report and visualize hate crimes around the United States. Described above under Social Sciences Computing.

MRF Portal

May 2018 - Present | CNH Technology Committee

A web app organize and submit club/distict data (e.g. service hours and funds raised). Described above under Circle K International - Software developer.

Live Stock

March 2018 | LA Hacks

Awarded Best Use of Blackrock API, Live Stock was a stock advising tool integrating both technical analysis and sentiment analysis. I setup the NodeJS server to gather, compute, and serve data. I worked with an Economics student to implement the technical analysis algorithms, such as various macd's. The other team members worked on a Bootstrap-driven front-end and the sentiment analysis, handled by Google's natural language processing API combined with Twitter's data API and some augments to account for bias.