15-213, Introduction to Computer Systems, is a class that builds on previous exposure to C and teaches students about the underpinnings of modern computer systems, such as caching, memory management, bitwise operations, multi-threading/concurrency, system architecture and more. At the end of my undergraduate degree, I TAed 15-213 for three semesters (Spring 2022, Summer 2022, Spring 2023); one of those semesters (Summer 2022) as the Head TA.

My responsibilities include:

As a Head TA for the Summer of 2022, I worked with the professors of the course to maintain course standards, coordinate weekly staff meetings, following up with Lead TAs on their parts of the course and making sure that the course runs smoothly.

The project that I was assigned to this summer was to enhance the MQTT Test Client, which was done using React, Redux and TypeScript. Firstly, I had to fix two bugs present in the client. The first bug was an issue with the client failing to reconnect after a period of time; after determining that the issue was most probably the possible chance that the keepalive timer of 5 minutes and the session ID expiry of 5 minutes could intersect and cause an expiry before the keepalive check happened, I updated both the keepalive time and the reconnecting time to ensure that the client would always be active while the tab was being used. This resolved nearly 100% of reconnection issues. The second bug turned out to be user error of sending various data through the test client, but working on the bug helped me understand how to send data properly through the client.

My main feature was working on constructing a payload that would save its own state in the Redux data store and be associated with each topic that can be subscribed to within the test client. To do this, I spent some time figuring out the architecture of the test client, which helped me work with the UX team to design a payload. Then, for my implementation, I updated the existing interfaces to add fields that could store the information necessary, and in the parts of the test client that allowed for changes to be made to the payload, I added checks and dispatches to ensure the information in the store would always be up to date. This also involved changing the publishing flow of messages to the test client. I was able to finish my project by thoroughly testing each component I made with Jest and presenting to AWS leadership.

The project for my internship is to work on a client-facing dashboard in an Agile environment, and I began by designing widget appearance and working with the client and the remainder of the full-time team to determine optimal use cases for various tasks requested. I then used Angular, Typescript and Bootstrap to implement a static top bar along with minimization and expanding features for each widget, along with deletion functionalities. Then, I was given responsibility over the Tasks widget, where I used RESTful APIs to grab data from the MySQL tasks database and filter that data to only display tasks within specific buckets of time, and also dynamically updated the buckets when the application is restarted to display the number of tasks per bucket in the bucket headers.

At the end of this internship, my team presented to executive directors at JPMorgan Chase, which decided that our presentation was a Top 2 Presentation among 31 teams from our location.