Ashfak Uddin

College: Hunter College

Education Level: Sophomore

Career Interest: Software Development

I'm sure you know my general description and career interests from previous questions, so I'll get into the more nuanced side of myself. I love experimenting with different food combinations and either gagging or loving how they taste; from chips dipped in Nutella to salty milk to kiwi with pizza (I gagged just as much as you think I did). I really do recommend peanut butter with ice cream though. I love reading about mysteries and how they get solved; not much of an expert myself but I can appreciate how much skill it takes to turn away from a setup and infer what actually happened from clues. Similarly, I love seeing people interact with each other to see firsthand the inner workings of our brains; we prefer company over loneliness no matter how introverted you are, we sometimes prefer low risk low reward versus high risk high reward, we flock to people similar to us personality wise and might ostracize those who aren't, etc. I tend to take the least favored side of arguments I find myself invested in. I love playing devil's advocate, waging a mental war against multiple other people alone is my form of entertainment. Cackling with glee as I find my opponents contradict themselves or each other. You may call me an evil mastermind being like that; I just find it interesting to see how different individual people can be but ultimately how similar we are at our cores. I do recognize that this approach can sometimes be seen as argumentative or confrontational, and I make sure to never insult anyone directly (even if I may seem to at first glance), and always listen to others hoping for a genuine, thoughtful discussion.

What was your role?

CS (SWE)

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

Most people have a lot of “lofty” monetary goals in mind; become successful in life, get out of debt, buy the latest high tech car, etc. But not many people realize how big of a staircase they’re looking at until they’ve made too many inefficient decisions to go back and restart. Unadat’s Goals and Milestones project is a plan to deal with exactly that; dividing a large “goal” into smaller sub goals that a user can conquer individually. In essence, it’s taking that staircase with huge steps the user saw before and flattening it out to have more steps, but of way more manageable height. If done correctly, it would aid tons of people in decision making, particularly those who haven’t started working towards their goal yet, or those who did a bunch of bad decisions and need advice on how to get back on track.

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

What skills have you gained?

I`ve picked up Jira and am starting to get to know PHP in terms of technical skills, and starting to feel more comfortable working in a remote setting with others. The icebreakers were nice to get me settled into the company. In terms of other skills, I`d say I`ve gotten experience with asking others for help when I need it. I`ve been used to being the one that helps, but I had to ask my peers for help with navigating cloud shell and what not (and I`m definitely going to be asking either Sean or Daniel about how to use Jira or Scrum at some point...)

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

Navigating the google cloud shell; it felt weird coding in a browser at first (haven`t done that since my repl.it days in high school, haha) but I`ve since acclimated to that. I`m still researching about if there`s a way to view changes without deploying or being able to run it locally, though

How has company culture guided your work?

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?

It was pretty smooth from what I experienced, but maybe contact the interns a bit earlier before it starts; I was a bit worried for a while not hearing back until the Wednesday or Thursday before we started.