From Jacksonville, Florida, Rohan is an undergraduate Computer Science major at the Georgia Institute of Technology that is currently employed at Lyft as a Software Engineer in the Streaming Platform team of the Rideshare organization. He is experienced in multiple avenues of CS including application & mobile development, data analysis & machine learning, front-end & back-end development, and much more. In his free time, he competitively dances, DJs, and travels. He utilizes his skillset and experiences towards company missions that resonate with him: one that aims to better the welfare and productivity of everyone in the world.
My Internship Experiences
My fifth and final internship was with Microsoft in the Summer of 2020 as part of the Windows Azure Store (WAS) organization. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I participated in the internship program remotely from my home in Jacksonville, Florida but the internship would've taken place in Redmond, WA.
Azure Storage requires the use of collections of storage nodes called tenants to be maintained and continuously handled for utilization across Microsoft's many datacenters. Maintenance of these tenants means deploying software packages that are meant to improve its security and policies regarding space partitioning and other protocols. My team, XDeployment, is in charge of these deployments and ensuring they occur successfully. Due to the complex nature of these deployments, an assortment of tasks and information that is essential to managing deployments are repeatedly desired and searched for, information retrieval that could be automated. The Azure Storage Bot was meant to answer these needs, and served as my project for the internship.
Residing in Microsoft Teams, the chatbot was in dire need of feature extensions as it faced a paucity of purposeful functionality. During my time this summer, I added new deployment related features through an architecture that allowed the XDeployment team greater utilization of the bot, cutting down Time to Investigate & Response for on-call with answering FAQ regarding Azure Storage deployments by achieving end to end integration for all coded features. This starts from the backend command client using KQL functions in the XStore connection of Kusto, to the appropriate response objects coded in C#, and the frontend dialogs that handled user input and parameter validation. Technologies such as LUIS, Azure, and VMs were encountered during the development process.
This internship happened remotely for the entire summer. However, I was blessed to be with my family and remain safe from COVID-19 during this time, even though I lived in a state that eventually become the global epicenter of the world. With strong support from my friends and my amazing team, I was able to have a successful internship that allowed me to learn and grow with conscious regard of my work-life balance and mental health. The great degree of flexibility in my work and the amazing culture that I participated in with Microsoft were definitely the biggest highlights of the internship program and are aspects that I've learned will be necessities in deciding my full-time job.
My fourth internship was with Lyft in the Spring of 2020 in San Francisco as a part of the Basemap team of the Mapping organization.
Lyft has two maps that it utilizes: one is provided by Google, which is used within the driver and rider applications for their respective navigation UIs and that Lyft currently has to pay Google for. The second is the internally built LyftMap, which is levied towards ETA and pricing purposes. The LyftMap is generated based on the map data sources that Basemap collects and aggregates, primarily OpenStreetMap (OSM) and TomTom. Basemap gets data packets from these sources and converts them into a format that is Lyft compatible. In this format, Basemap can construct an extensive MapGraph that constitutes a LyftMap version based on the map data of that date. This is my team's primary focus: on handling the data ingestion, tooling, and distribution of information required that constituted the daily LyftMap versions generated. This was essential so that all of Basemaps clients, including teams within Lyft, would use standardized maps that were synced and up-to-date.
My internship was focused on the Scorecard project. The goal of the Scorecard project was to automate visualization of LyftMap quality measurements to enable customers to adopt maps with greater confidence. For any version, these metrics would be easily rendered in the Scorecard. The Map Quality team had developed metrics and methods for assessing quality that are becoming better understood within the team. The objective was to create greater access to this quality analysis by communicating and visualizing this effectively beyond the team. The design of the Scorecard was not fully defined when the internship began, so my internship was focused on fleshing out this vision of the project. My deliverables consisted of Mode Report dashboards that served as Scorecards for the metrics generated by Basemaps. My project serves as a centralized framework for measurement visualization for the Basemaps team and anyone in the Lyft organization to use for all the map quality measurements that are generated now and in the future. I worked with Python to supplement the existing codebase with wrappers and modifications to help deliver metric data to Hive for querying purposes. Once that flow was completed, I was able to query this data through the Mode Analytics dashboards I made for the Scorecard project. The dashboards were visually coded by HTML/CSS/JS, the data was ingested through Presto/Hive SQL, and the data was munged and transformed into map visualizations using Python, specifically by utilizing the pandas, matplotlib, and geopandas libraries.
Halfway through my internship, the coronavirus pandemic struck San Francisco hard, starting the massive work from home (WFH) shift in the workforce. With the support of my family that I returned to once it became apparent that the WFH order was long-term (that it would last past the scope of my internship end date), the amazing intern class I became close friends with, and my supportive mentors, I was able to WFH efficiently and succesfully in spite of the obstacles. This internship taught me the responsibility and excitement that comes with taking full ownership of a project and its delivery. Most importantly though, I learned to embrace the struggles that came both in life with the coronvirus pandemic & with work -- to persevere through them and become stronger as both an engineer and a person.
My third internship was with Amazon in the Summer of 2019 in Seattle as a part of the Amazon Enterprise Access (AEA) team of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) organization.
Amazon Enterprise Access Mobile is a team that develops on both iOS and Android platforms in order to provide mobile solutions to accessing company services on the go. By handling security tokens and trust certificates dynamically, Amazonians are able to use the applications as a way to gain access to corporate applications they need to be productive anywhere and at anytime, with the eventual long-term goal of providing the service to clients outside of Amazon.
My internship was focused on the Amazon Enterprise Access Android application. For this summer, I was assigned the “Service Catalog for AEA Mobile Apps” project which encompassed 6 major milestones, one per two-week sprint: ramp-up/setup, bookmark migration and its accompanying metric submission, type-ahead autocomplete feature, server side setup with AppService, client side setup with AppSync, and then wrap-up to ensure the aforementioned features were production-ready. The goal of the project was to achieve feature parity between the Android and iOS applications, as the iOS client had been further developed since it served as the prototype and predecessor of AEA. The first two features (migration and type-ahead) were predominantly developed within Android Studio, requiring me to leverage Kotlin, the MVP architecture, and advanced Git techniques for parallel CRs (code reviews). The last two features of the client-side and server-side setup required learning how to leverage AWS services including Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, API Gateway, and I coded in SQL and Python during these milestones. The internship proved to be an amazing learning opportunity that allowed me to gain experience and develop in many diverse areas: working with Python in an enterprise context, encountering and working with databases using SQL, and most of all learning what the difference is between functional and high-quality code. I had to learn the characteristics that define those differences and make sure my code matched to those high standards.
During my internship, I lived in Seattle but commuted to Bellevue where my office was located. Compounded with the newfound close friendships that I made during the summer with people I had previously only been acquainted too, I learned what it meant to live in and explore a big city -- and to fall in love with it.
My second internship was with Manhattan Associates in Atlanta in the Spring of 2019 as a part of the OMNI team.
The company provides software solutions to large global providers in handling their own omnichannel supply chain distribution networks. I worked primarily on creating UI samples using Angular though Stackblitz that would allow for extensions on Manhattan Associates's solution to Call Center UI's. This would allow for early testing of feature extensibility without the time investment required to implement the behvarior as clients could choose what extensions they wanted to provide their personalized call centers with. This project required extensive understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript.
During my time I also worked a fellow Co-Op student from Georgia Tech on a side project that utilized both of our combined skillsets. People across the organization used a centralized ACE editor in order to engineer and edit Cucumber Tests, and the editor is coded in Java. A major issue raised was that progress of Cucumber Tests run in the editor had to be checked manually by manual input, regardless of whether it had been completed or was still in progress. Through pair programming, my peer and I worked to improve this response behavior by modifying the existing configuration in the code so that feedback blockage was removed and script status could be returned back to the UI, therefore providing automatic updates on test status. This was achieved by combining my knowledge of JavaScript and HTML through working with Angular in my main project with my peer's knowledge of Java/Spring from her personal intern project.
During my internship, I grew close to the other Co-Op students from Georgia Tech and Georgia State University while simultaneously living on campus and dedicating my non-work hours to my commitments of GT Ramblin' Raas and A-Town Showdown. This semester taught me much about managing my work-life balance while combining the best of both my professional and personal worlds.
My first internship was with Raytheon in Indianapolis in the Summer of 2018 as a part of the V-22 Osprey team. This was before it became Raytheon Technologies.
I worked primarily on supporting scripts and applications that furthered team productivity through better data munging of relevant information to exportable formats. One such example was a batch file that would determine data packet deliveries in a stream and export its associated information into a csv (Comma Separated Values) file that could be more easily parsed through for manual analysis. I also worked with WireShark and Java during the semester.
My most important project was a C# application that allowed users to export their User Stories and other units of work via Agile methodology managed through Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) into PowerPoint (.pptx) files. I heavily utilized Visual Studio as my IDE and niche C# libraries that communicated with TFS to complete this project.
During my internship, I was part of Xtern, a program that provided a full-packaged internship experience with networking events for both professional development and personal enrichment, providing me with both growth in corporate soft skills and life-long friends.
