My Work

My internship with FSoft took place in Tukwila, Washington. Just south of Seattle at the Boeing Airfield. I joined the Compliance and Analytics team at FSoft that was working on a Web Application for Boeing that would help with ensuring their devices were compliant with security standards.

It was one of my first experiences with NodeJS and I was able to become very familiar with Bootstrap, UnderscoreJS, Express and DataTables. My main goal was to update the UI and UX for the part of the application that most users would visit to be able to digest all the information as well as the main table that listed all the devices for the airlines that would use the application.

The first step was for me to build a high-fidelity prototype according to some specifications I was given. I then pitched the design to the Lead Developer and Project Manager in the C&A team, and after sucessfully doing so my job was to implement the changes.

After spending time reading documentation, reading the code, playing with, and understanding the application I figured that reading could only do so much and I needed to start implementing. As I worked on the application understanding the flow of data I realized that one of the things my team members forgot to mention was that I would need to implement the possibility to lazy-load the data for the table, because some airlines might have thousands of devices. The test data included an airline that had thousands of rows and without any changes would take minutes to load the page.

I did choose to focus on other features such as developing an intuitive searchbar with added filters to search by, new menu icons, and a design that mostly followed material design standards so that it would be familiar to new users. When I finally got to implementing the lazy loading towards the end of my internship I realized that it would require a decent amount of backend work with an API.

At this point in my knowledge I had not implemented something like this before, and I was running out of time. I decided the best thing for me to do was to get as far as I could, and lay the ground work for future developments. The frontend was all ready to go in terms of receiving data and being configured to process it correctly. All that needed to be done was to create and call an API to deliver the right information.

By the end of the internship I felt a lot more comfortable working under deadlines and in a professional environment. Especially one at the actual Boeing Airfield, where the Museum of Flight was practically right across from my building. By far the coolest thing to me though was the sense of price and authority that my security badge gave me. The responsiblity and officialness (for lack of a better word at the moment) that the badge carried was immense and it was empowering knowing I was doing meaningful work for a company that was globally recognized. Unfortunately due to the secure nature of the project I cannot check in on it's progress or be able to see what impacts I had on the product. I am content though in the work I did and belief that someone someday will or currently is using the UI I designed and implemented is why I love working in this industry.

I am also grateful that the internship gave me the chance to develop my professional Vietnamese and be able to really observe the culture at Boeing between the FSoft and Boeing employees as each side were from very different backgrounds. Just the fact that the Vietnamese employees would always eat together at the same time, across teams, while many of the Boeing employees were content with eating with one other person or by themselves whenever they had a lull in their work. Being a mixed child gave me an interesting opportunity to be a middle man in a way that many of the employees couldn't be as they were either American, or Vietnamese, but not both.