Jia Hao.

I had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for the Technology Leadership Initiative program at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Specifically, the course is CSC207 Software Design.

In this role, I provided technical and knowledge support to students in the program as they worked to create a software application MVP that addresses a real world problem in under 12 weeks.

A few of my responsibilities included:

• Explained and illustrated key software design concepts such as SOLID principles, design patterns, and clean architecture.
• Provided technical support and recommendations for students’ projects, such as in database design, Java & Spring Boot, API development, testing, CI/CD deployment, and cloud services.
• Reviewed and graded tests and projects, and communicated feedback and insights to students and instructors.

I worked in the Payment Programs team, which owns the systems that enables special payment programs for AWS customers, such as Fixed Currency Exchange, Advance Payment and discounts. In this role, I learnt to work with highly scalable, distributed, and critical systems, as the team’s services are used by millions of AWS customers worldwide.

In the course of my internship, I owned the planning, design & delivery of a new foundational data service that integrates various payment programs data from multiple external sources for millions of customers. Some of the technologies I worked with include Java, Kotlin, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, ECS/Fargate, Cloudwatch, auto-scaling policies and load testing infrastructures.

Some of what I accomplished in that 3-month period include:

• Architected a new microservice that provides a unified API for accessing payment programs data that has 99% availability, less than 300ms latency, and scales to millions of requests per day in multiple global regions based on SLA.
• Delivered the service that is fully integrated and deployed, with full testing and monitoring infrastructure set up, accelerating the team’s roadmap by 50%.
• Created APIs and data models with extensive use of dependency injection and interface segregation principles to facilitate future extensibility; these serve as a foundation for the team to expand to new payment programs and data types easily in the future.

This was my first software engineering internship, where I worked on building features for Ratio.City, a web application that provides comprehensive tools and data to simplify and accelerate housing development planning processes.

A few of the technologies I worked with include Angular, Jasmine/Karma, Docker, and Python.

Some highlights from this internship include:

• Spearheaded the unit and integration testing initiative for the Angular app using Karma and Jasmine, achieving 80%+ code coverage; also led a knowledge sharing session to onboard other developers on testing best practices.
• Delivered in-app survey tool that collects user feedback on a new “Locate” beta feature, which was used to gather insights from over 50 users and informed future feature improvements.
• Experimented and prototyped Matomo analytics integration to track user interactions and behaviours, as part of an early product effort into understanding user engagement and pain points.