Note: Since this project was internal to the company (I implemented some Angular guards that required a
company login in order to view the app), I sadly do not have any images of the app.
Project Details:
Created a portal allowing insurance teams to view policies that require attention.
Usual access databases would take a long time to update with new policies and new policy
information so a web app to show them updating in real-time would be easier
Showed properties of each policy on the app
Policy Id, Client Id, Client Name, Created Date, Updated Date, Specialist, and the reason
the policy requires attention
Example: one or more of the requirements to validate the policy failed
Allowed users to change information about the policy
Examples:
Update specialist
Update notes of the policy
Update statuses of the policy
Timeline
It was a proof of concept, so we continued adding stuff right up until the end of the co-op.
It was about a three month project.
App was created by me and three other co-op students with help from Paychex developers.
Requirements for features on the app were provided by a Paychex employee who had just graduated from
University of Buffalo so he was close to our age and understood how young developers in the industry
think and handle situations.
We had a supervisor who we communicated with as well.
Challenges I Faced:
I went into this internship solely as a front-end developer, as the only
server side experience I had leading up to that point was Node.js and Java.
For the first few weeks I was mainly in a front-end role.
However, a few weeks in, I was working on an Angular form that would add new fields to
certain policies in the database. The back-end developers on our team had full task-loads,
so, in order to implement the feature, I had to quickly learn Python and Python Flask.
It seemed very intimidating at first. I often use my knowledge of other coding languages as
a starting point when learning new ones (and in the past my knowledge of C# helped me with
writing Java), but Python has unique coding, formatting, and syntax requirements and doesn't
allow a lot of what is required or permitted in the langauges I had learned in my major,
JavaScript and C#, so I was unable to use a large portion of my prior coding, syntax, and
formatting knowledge as a base. Facing these challenges head on made me really enjoy trying
a new language and I found that I was ready for even more new challenges. I decided to start
by studying the code my teammates wrote for the other database calls and used that to get a
hang of things.
This worked perfectly – eventually by the end I was writing more advanced Flask
api-handling code to not just pull data from a database container but also to upsert
it (a cool databasing term I learned on this job that means update if something exists
or insert if it doesn’t!) and, in one case, create the container via Flask, upsert data
into it, and, for each new POST request, check if the container existed and if it did
add to the existing one instead of creating a new duplicate one.
If I could do it over again, I’d make sure to not be as hesitant about writing back-end code
– I thoroughly enjoyed working with Python Flask and am very grateful (one of a VERY LONG
list of things I'm grateful to Paychex for!) to this company for helping me leave
my comfort zone to try new things.
Exceeding Expectations:
One instance I think could qualify as going beyond their expectations was, continuing from the previous
section, my switch from front-end to full stack developer. I was initially hired for my front-end & UI/UX
skills – someone who could layout a web app, style it, populate the app with data, and create icons and
logos whenever needed. After I went out of my comfort zone and began writing server side code as well, other
developers congratulated and thanked me for adapting to and taking on a new role so quickly and for the
benefit of both the app and its users.