Technological Skill and Proficiency

Elaborating on whether I have achieved my personal goal of technological skill and proficiency.

Defining the Goal

Technological skill and proficiency are, in this context, meant to represent the acquired technical knowledge throughout this internship and my familiarity or fluency with it. Not only do I find it important to learn new things, but I want to be able to apply them well and make successful projects with them.

What I had in mind was the desire to learn new languages or frameworks and apply these in contexts I had not seen before.

Factors Contributing to My Goal

The very nature of the Avatar Validation Pipeline offered me a large degree of freedom with which to choose my technology. Much of this can be seen here. From the onset, the main desires of the stakeholders were that the pipeline be modular, deployed to the cloud and use as few languages/frameworks as possible. Aside from this, I was given more or less free reign (as long as my decisions were founded on good ideas and research).

Because of this, I embraced this opportunity with open arms. The first place this can be seen is in my prototype using C++ (a language I had never used before). After doing the aforementioned research, in which I tried out both Ruby-on-Rails and Laravel, I concluded the project would likely need machine learning in the future. This brought me to Python, which is eventually what the rest of the project was implemented in. I had used it briefly in the past, but never to create actual applications.

Furthermore, development itself was done entirely using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Linux development was not something I had done before, and this was the perfect opportunity to work almost entirely in the terminal. I have no doubt this will be very beneficial in any future development job, and my relative fluency with the terminal is entirely due to this project.

Finally, the cloud deployment itself was a new experience. Though I have used cloud services in the past (mainly in my previous project for NTRI in Google Cloud), this was the first time I have been asked to develop cloud-first on my own. Thanks in part to Mark Klerkx, I was able to investigate the different Azure services on offer and combine them to create the pipeline as it stands now.

Have I Achieved This Goal?

Based on the paragraph above, I definitely have. This internship has offered me ample opportunity to learn new technology and apply it in an interesting context that tests my development knowledge to a satisfactory degree.

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