Dong Huang Chen

College: The City College of New York

Education Level: High School Diploma

Career Interest: Tech, Game Development, SWE

Dong is a sharp student pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the City College of New York. Dong has a strong interested in web, mobile, and game development. This summer Dong is participating in Code Path's technical interview prep to further his career in software engineering. When Dong is not studying or learning you can find him on a bike or by his local parks running and playing badminton.

What was your role?

At Unadat my team mostly worked on breaking Unadat.com, fixing bugs, and looking at UI improvements. However, currently in our last sprint we are working on a simple notification feature to notify users which will finally allow Unadat enjoyers to see all notable changes such as a friend request or a fundraiser donation.

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

The impact of our work is that Unadat`s desktop site now provides users with a better experience than before. Though more work needs to be done to further polish Unadat.com, we have made many changes to improve the functionality of the website. In a bigger light our actions are a small part, however the ideas that my team brought carries onto the future and will certainly affect Unadat`s in the coming times one way or another.

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

Team mates come in all different shapes and sizes. From my team mates I`ve come to realize that everyone has different skill levels, experience, and motivations. This also taught me the importance of splitting tasks properly and understanding what your teammates have got and when they need help.

What skills have you gained?

Though I have certainly gotten more acquainted with PHP and the tech stack at Unadat, I mostly picked up on non technical skills. Somethings I picked up on are the importance of team work. Although going alone I could have done many of the things my team mates did, having their perspectives and work helped with multitasking and discovering some bugs I may not have come across.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock I`ve had to overcome was not a singular thing, but rather the whole process. Really I was always looking at bugs and problems I didn`t know how to solve or I was solving it the wrong way. However with persistence and debugging I have been able to get through them.

How has company culture guided your work?

Unadat`s culture was very inclusive and flexible. This helped me be more at ease and allowed me to work without having to worry about very strict deliverables or deadlines. Because team work and scrum was a large part of the process it was clear what the objectives and roadblocks were every week.

What was your experience at Unadat?

My experience at Unadat was an interesting one. While I have gotten better acquainted with the new tech stack (PHP, Javascript, MySQL), what I really took away from my time at Unadat was something different. One thing I was introduced to was scrum which I thought was weird and mysterious. But after my time at Unadat I realized that it`s not really about how cool the word scrum sounds, but about communication, planning, and objectives. Coming together and planning a sprint for the next week helps a lot with what to expect by the end of the week and what we were going to do. Another thing about Unadat was that it has some startup vibes so it differs from traditional big tech, however an advantage of that was more flexibility in some areas such as being able to speak communicate directly with Sean and Dan. But with that being said, one thing I kind of regret was not questioning Sean and Dan more about the direction Unadat is headed towards and maybe the QI team could have worked less on smaller bug fixes and more on developing new features. My reasoning is that bug fixes are great, but only if they are a high priority and for a 60/40 product bug fixes may take a lot of time for not so much emph.

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

There was no big project we worked on during the internship as our quality improvement team focused on iteration, polishing, and gradual improvement. We did this through scrum meetings week through the Jira software where we would come together on Microsoft teams and create the issues we worked on the for the week. We would discuss as a team how many "story points" issues were and distributed issues to team members to solve. These could be a new features, bug fixes, user experience ideas, or maybe a request from our supervisors.

What advice would you give to future interns?

There were a lot of different teams during my time at Unadat. If you guys ever feel like something is not for you speak out and negotiate a new position. Also don`t hesitate to ask your supervisors anything, really its their job that you do well.