Experience

IT Application Associate

May 2021 - August 2022

Languages &
Frameworks

Java, PL/SQL, Oracle ADF, Git

Programs &
Technologies

JDeveloper, GitLab, Toad, Postman, Excel, PowerBI

Work & Role Description:

I worked a 16-month co-op at Celestica's head office in Toronto between my third and fourth academic year at McMaster. I liked the idea of a 16-month co-op because it allowed me to take a full year off of school, occupy both summers, and start my final year in September. This way there would be no course scheduling conflicts and I would be back in classes with people I knew who did the same.

I joined an international team of roughly 10 people, including my manager, and a number of other developers. Though my manager and around half of the team worked from Toronto with me, I didn't get a chance to meet them in person until a year into my work, when pandemic restrictions were lifted.

My time at Celestica had me supporting a number of existing, large-scale web applications for internal use. The main application I worked on was called QuoteApp, which covered every step of a project's life. QuoteApp was so big that I can't honestly explain it. Handling project creation, team management, distrubutor analysis, supplier RFQs, BOMs, cost analysis, price lookups, and resistor matrices, and a hundred other things I was not exposed to, QuoteApp did a ton. There were hundreds of functionalities that I never had a chance to see over my 16-months at Celestica, let alone work on or understand.

QuoteApp was constantly being added to, with a never-ending supply of enhancements and bug fixes to attend to. Depending on the size of these enhancements, they took anywhere from a couple of days to a number of weeks. On average, a single enhancement took 4 days in total. This included a couple days to create on my local environment, integrate with the development environment, and another day or two to test and make further changes. Then the feature would remain on the development environment for user acceptance testing (UAT) before being included in the next production release.

QuoteApp was made using Java and Oracle ADF as an end-to-end web framework, hosted on WebLogic Server. Oracle ADF connected to Oracle Server, where we used PL/SQL to store and connect to databases. The majority of enhancements involved Java programming, Oracle ADF domain knowledge, and PL/SQL programming. We used JDeveloper as an IDE for the Java and ADF side, and Toad for database management, including PL/SQL programming.

The largest project I worked on was adding price analysis with Mouser's external API. You can read more about this on my project page, where I go into detail about the problem and project. This project spanned a couple of months, where I used and tested a REST API using Postman, handled API connection and data payload within Java, and then performed financial analysis using complex PL/SQL procedures.

My time at Celestica taught me a lot about development on large projects with multiple contributing teams in a professional environment. I was able to work on every part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), from requirement elicitation and design meetings, to enhancement development and iteration, to testing, UAT, and production release. I gained experience with code reviews, pair programming, rigourous testing, and of course software development skills.

Global IT Solutions Intern

May 2020 - August 2020

Languages &
Frameworks

JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Vue, Node, Express, SQL, Git

Programs &
Technologies

Docker, MySQL, GitHub, Jira

Work & Role Description:

I worked at Roche Canada for 4 months during my summer break in 2020, which was fully remote due to it being the height of the pandemic. My team consisted of me and another co-op student as developers, a project manager who we reported to, as well as a scrum master, business analyst, and professional UX designer. Our goal was to create the Skill Explorer project, which you can learn about on my projects page.

It took a few weeks to get up and running properly, as software installations, proper understanding of the project, and learning new technologies all took time. I had never created a web application before, and was meant to use all of JavaScript, Vue.js, and MySQL for the first time. After doing a ton of research in my personal time and learning how to use the frameworks and set up the project, we got started with the real project development.

We worked in sprints, with each sprint lasting a week with a predetermined number of tasks in scope for that sprint. Every morning we had a daily scrum, where I would share the work I completed and what I was doing next. To facilitate project management and task completion we used Jira.

This experience allowed me to work alongside a number of experienced professionals, like a UX designer and business analyst. The UX designer used Figma mockups, showing us their vision and allowing us to come to a decision on the look and feel of the application. The designs then acted as a guide for my development. When designing the backend, I also got to work alongside a business analyst who was familiar with MySQL and database design. They helped me learn the technology as well as structure the database around the business.

In the end we completed the application, but were unable to see it deployed into a production environment before we left. Another team took over the security and code review for production code. Ultimately the experience was invaluable to me, as this was my first exposure to web application development, and taught me a new framework in Vue, taught me Node, Express, and Axios, and taught me MySQL, all from scratch. Working alongside my small team also enabled me to focus purely on the developmental aspect of the project. Overall this was a great experience as the work, people, and environment were fantastic.

Commercial Finance Intern

May 2019 - August 2019

Languages &
Frameworks

Excel VBA, Google Apps Script

Programs &
Technologies

Google Sheets, Excel, Tableau

Work & Role Description:

My commerical finance internship at Roche involved a number of small projects, focused around optimization and automation of processes. This allowed me to work with a number of different people across a number of different departments and functionalities.

The first project was partially automating quarterly analysis that had to be done on a huge Excel spreadsheet. I learned Excel VBA for macro programming in order to automate a large portion of the analysis. Previously taking multiple days for someone to perform quarterly analysis, I was able to cut the time down to less than a day, with a majority of the work being automated at the push of a button.

Another automation project I worked on was with part-time employee timesheets. Most employees are salaried, but a number of employees work part time and are meant to track their hours, expenses, etc. for any given week. The existing system used paper documents to track hours, where employees would fill this in and submit for approval, making changes as necessary and resubmitting until it is signed and agreed to. I was tasked with updating this system to use Google Sheets. I created a simple spreadsheet for employees to track their hours, expenses, upload receipts, etc. We wanted the sheet to be a central repository for managers, where they could visit one place to see all the different employee's sheets, approve or request changes for each one, and request employees fill out their information. We wanted the same sheet to be private for employees, ensuring they could see only their own submissions and approval status.

The solution to this was Google Apps Scripts macros, where I was able to program different buttons and views for different user groups, ensuring managers and other employees were given different levels of access and functionality to the application. Managers were able to add comments, approve sheets, and request changes or that employees fill their sheets via email connection at the push of a button. This project is still used today, and saves time for both managers and employees.

Another project I worked on was using Tableau to create dynamic data visualizations for another employee. They wanted to add some interesting visualizations to their presentations, which allowed me to learn Tableau and Tableau's programming language, VisQL. Some personal favourites are geographical heatmaps and Sankey diagrams.

Finally, I did some graphical design work for employee travel and entertainment (T&E) guidelines. After being included in a number of sprints with some VIPs to determine Roche's T&E rules, budgets, and legal requirements, we needed to train employees on the new regulations. Rather than a boring text document outlining the rules, or a corporate training video that nobody wants to watch, we wanted to create something concise, visually appealing, yet comprehensive.

I was tasked with making a visually engaging, double-sided infographic that contained all important T&E regulations. Though visual design is not a skill I often attribute to myself, this infographic turned out amazingly. When I came back to work at Roche the following year as a Global IT Solutions Intern, the infographic I made was part of my onboarding training. It is still used today as the quick reference and onboarding document for T&E at Roche Canada.