Muhammad Chaudhry

College:

Education Level: Sophomore

Career Interest: Software Engineer

My name is Muhammad Chaudhry and I am a sophomore at CUNY Hunter College as a Daeadalus Honors student. I've been coding since middle school and am passionate about web development and software engineering and hope to become a software engineer in the future. I enjoy going to hackathons and have created numerous projects using web development and mobile app development, my team and I recently won a hackathon as well for our medication mobile app. In my free time I like to lift weights, play volleyball, and play video games with my friends.

What was your role?

The first week i worked on changing the UI of the share challenges page to make it more user friendly and so that it matches the theme of the rest of the site The second week i worked on the portfolio page and trying to iterate milestones to be displayed onto the individual goals. I then worked on merging codes from the first few weeks and testing all of it to make sure the necessary changes were pushed I then worked on speeding up the development process for all interns working at Unadat by automating tedious tasks for redeployment via a extension. That reduced downtime by 50%, then my partner and I worked on adding an instant deployment method to get changes live without having to redeploy the site which cut down downtime by 95%. The last thing I worked on was creating an individual goal view inside of the milestones page which was the hardest ticket I had to work on throughout the internship. There were so many errors stemming from the work of previous teams so we had to spend a lot of time cleaning up and adding code to fix errors.

What did you work on?

UI changes, Portfolio Page, Goals and Milestones

What was the impact of your project?

What did you learn or improve on from this internship or from your teammates?

I have learned new ways of debugging code and approaching problems differently. The way I debug errors is much more efficient as I just search through the codebase for the name of the variables that are causing issues and compare that to other files. Having an additional person to debug your code with just taking a look at the code is great because they can bring a different perspective to the bug you are trying to fix or feature you are trying to add.

What skills have you gained?

I have learned to communicate with my team in a timely fashion so that we dont have to rush our deliverables and put in the time to produce quality results. I have also learned how to effectively use paired programming to debug issues as having a different person to look over your code without actually doing it alongside you helps you resolve silly mistakes and think of why you are running into issues faster . Using the Agile methodology along with scrum to measure how much time we needed to allocate to each task was pretty useful and I will probably employ those skills in my career. Using Linear to create tickets for each week helped breakdown what small tasks we needed to do to breakdown our ticket into smaller, more actionable steps.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock I had was working with anything that incorporated code from the portfolio file as it was thousand upon thousands of lines of code that werent really organized well. Trying to fix code written by others was pretty frustrating as well as I had to get familiar with a lot of ambiguous code. Copying and pasting thousands of lines of code and then having to merge that code was such a headache as you never know what will go wrong after the merge.

How has company culture guided your work?

The company culture is amazing as everyone including the CEO and CTO feel like fellow coworkers instead of employee and employer. Conversations with other interns are very casual and creates a comfortable environment where I dont feel out of place when asking questions or asking for help.

What was your experience at Unadat?

What was one big project you worked on during the internship? Can you walk me through the process?

What advice would you give to future interns?

Dont be afraid of asking questions and talk to your fellow interns more, theyre going to be your greatest assets moving forward. Try to start your tasks right at the start of the sprint so you dont have to wait till last second.