Fred Spielman

College: The City College of New York

Education Level: Sophmore

Career Interest: Hardware Engineer

Hello, my name is Fred Spielman, and I am a second-year computer engineering student at The City College of New York. My career goal is to become a hardware engineer, since I have always been interested in how electronic devices function. I enjoy watching movies, with my favorite directors being Martin Scorsese, Park Chan-wook, and Quentin Tarantino. Another hobby that I recently started and have been enjoying is taking care of and observing my planted freshwater aquarium.

What was your role?

Displaying progress tracker status for the user in the challenges page and for all users that were part of the challenge in the challenges pop-up Function to mark a milestone as complete Replaced "task view" with priority milestone div Milestone filtering buttens for end date within 1 week and 1 month, incomplete milestones, and reset the filtering options Testing, merging, and debugging milestone files SQL stored procedures and automation for resetting completion of chores and setting past due challenges as complete SQL stored procedure and automation for checking and creating notifications for incomplete milestones that are due within one week or one day

What did you work on?

Milestone filtering & SQL

What was the impact of your project?

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

From this internship, I learned how to use git. For the first few weeks, I learned about branches, as well as fetching, pushing, and pulling from origin from my teammates. When I had the merging ticket, I learned how to merge, test, and debug the merged file. I also asked my teamates about some of the processes and how some of the code they wrote since I never used JavaScript, AJAX, or PHP before.

What skills have you gained?

I had never done web development before, so learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS was new to me. I have also never manipulated data on a database before or collaborated with many people on a codebase, therefore I picked up the skills from learning SQL and git and understanding how to collaborate with others on a similar project. I also learned how to use linear, which made tickets more organized, and scrum pocker, where we ranked the tickets for the sprint based on their complexity with fibonacci numbers.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock that I experienced was for displaying the status on the progress bar. Since it was my first time on the codebase and using JavaScript, I had to read through a lot of the previous code and understand it. Displaying the status had many problems because I had to change some of the previous code in portfolio.php where the wrong functions were called and some of the util.challenges functions. It also took me a while to figure out that displaying all the users on the popups were in the list items variable.

How has company culture guided your work?

The ability to ask questions at any time and the quick responses helped me to understand some roadblocks that I encountered. The consistent structure for the scheduling of sprints every week also helped my stay consistent every week.

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?

Always ask questions if you do not understand or are facing an obstacle while coding. But dont instantly ask for help since struggling through challenges is when you learn the most.