Tag: 19AllenS

Day 8 at SAS

Today is the 8th and final day of my work experience at SAS. We started the day in building R to meet a employee that does the QUX or quality user experience of the product. She talked a lot about her job and gave us a very in depth tutorial on how to use the product she has been working on. She also showed us a broken product and how she is able to give critiques back to the UI developers to fix. After the meeting we jumped boat to meet another SAS employee named Dan. Dan does a lot of the UI aspect of the products, which meant how it looks on the screen to customers. I was really interested in how all the parts of the product is compiled together, so he drew a diagram that showed the progression from the client all the way down the main servers. He also talked a lot about his previous job at a very small start-up company. He described it to be much more fun and enjoyable because you are able to watch your company grow. But he has also enjoyed SAS since it is more flexible on due dates and it is much more stable because the reason he had to leave the start-up was because an investment fell through.

For the second half of the day, we all met up again in building A to present our final projects. Although we only had around two days to do it, I felt like we all made very solid videos. It has been an amazing two weeks at SAS. Everybody is really nice and the campus is also very pretty. I really felt immersed in SAS culture and will definitely not forget about the food.

Peace.

Day 7 at SAS

It is day 7 of my work experience at SAS. Today, just like any other day, started off with a meeting with a developer that focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. He showed us some of the algorithms he has been working on since he has been at SAS. Aside from regular day-to-day work, he signed up to help transition some of the Java code into Go despite not knowing a single thing about it when he initially signed up. He really enjoyed learning the new language and SAS’s flexibility to allow you to work on things you would find enjoying. After the meeting with the developer, we met with two project managers. Although they are “managers”, they really are conductors. They lead without authority. Their job consists mostly of coordinating meetings, checking in with people on their job and making sure that the work flow is smooth.

After lunch, we shadowed Ms.Mayo and the two project mangers to a meeting with almost everybody on the project. Although it was only a discussion on a specific scrollbar, it showed how meticulous and careful SAS is about their products. After this group meeting, we met with another developer for a short bit. This developer worked mostly on hot fixes, so he showed us how he uses GIT to make changes on the master source code and making branches to test things out. At the end of the day, David and I met with a “themer”. The themer is someone who works mostly on color schemes using CSS. She showed us several of the styles she has been working on for the 11 products on her agenda. It is really interesting that SAS separates the front end down to someone who specifically focuses on QUX, UX, html, and CSS. Tomorrow, we will meet with two other developers who works closely with Ms.Mayo. I am very excited to see what their job entails.

 

Machine learning probability(beta distribution)

 

Day 6 at SAS

Today is the 6th day of my work experience program at SAS. Similar to last week, we job shadowed a woman who worked in the R & D program, but worked in a different building. She worked on the testing of the UI(front-end) of some of the products. She gave us a really detailed description of her job and answered some of the questions we had for her. A really interesting detail was that her entire team is actually all girls, which is extremely rare at SAS. After discussing about her job, we then went to a lunch meeting that discussed how they could improve their product based on customer’s wants along every step of the development process.

After lunch, we then proceeded to talk to one of the developers named Linda. She showed us a lot of her job as an admin on a software called Jira, which connects workers together to streamline and simplify the development and testing of a product. She also showed us some of the tools she was using to learn the programming language Go. This is because SAS has decided to transition from Java to Go in order to conserve a lot more memory. At the end of the day, we met with a few college interns to talk about college and their work experience.

 

Interns at SAS

Day 5 at SAS

Today is the 5th day of the work experience at SAS. We started off the day by watching another good example of the project we have been working on. The GatherIQ team thought the instructions were a little loose and gave us a few changes to help us on our video. My group choose to challenge people to dance wherever they are if they don’t know any facts about the water crisis. It took us over 40 tries to perfect the introduction where we introduced some of the facts about the water crisis in Africa and what the challenge is. I really begun to appreciate professional actors’ abilities to have composure even after silly screw ups. After editing the video, we also put together a marketing power point to illustrate out how we are planning on making this video viral in order for it to make an impact. We will be presenting the video on Thursday.

SAS chocolate coins

Building C

Day 4 at SAS

Today is day 4 of my work experience at SAS. Instead of all of us separating into different departments, we all convened to receive a presentation by a team that worked on an app called GatherIQ. GaterIQ is an app that gives insights on some of the world’s biggest problems and help to create world change. Just by learning about the information on the app, you are able to collect coins that convert to real money and can go directly to a non-profit organization. After the presentation, we split up into groups to act as testers for the app and give some options and feedback as to the usability and interface design parts of the app.

In the evening, we split up into groups to work on individual projects. The project is about creating a video that could go viral to help create awareness of a pressing issue and change. We will finish the project on Monday and hope it will turn out as fantastic as the ice bucket challenge videos.

Day 3 at SAS

It was another exciting day at SAS. In addition to Max, an associate developer that we met yesterday, we met with Jerry Holland and Scott today to learn more about how they got to where they are today. Scott first got interested in computer science when he got his first computer and his friends all wanted to make copies of game “illegally”. He then went to Purdue university and interned at many different software development companies to pay for his tuition. This gave him plenty of work experience. One of the things he mentioned was that he really loves computer science because it is forever changing and innovating. Some of the programming languages he learned in high school and college is almost completely obsolete now.

After the two meetings, we went to building A for lunch. After which, we drove around campus for a tour. It was really cool to see the various buildings and even a solar farm that powers some of Cary’s electricity. Another interesting thing was that in front of each building there is always a cool abstract art piece to complement the building. These two days with Mrs.Holland have been absolutely amazing. She has been a wonderful host.

 

Day 2 at SAS

May 29th, 2019

Day 2 of the work experience involved job shadowing Mrs.Holland, a software engineer that worked on the testing side of the SAS product. We first started the day with a meeting with Mr.Scott, the project manager, Paige, a coworker of Mrs.Holland, and two college interns to brief them on what specifically her team did. The coolest part of her presentation is where she was able to automate the testing of a test case by having the computer mimic all the steps a person would take to use the application in very fast speed(logging in, adding data, etc).

After the meeting we went to building C for lunch. The food was amazing as always. I decided to get sushi and a chicken sand-which to spice it up from yesterday’s pizza. After lunch, we went on a tour to see Dr.Goodnight’s gemstone collection. It was said that he collected over 400 kinds of gemstones from all over the world, including Brazil, China, Russia, and the Republic of Congo.

At the end of the day, we met with someone on the development side of the product. He just graduated from the University of Illinois and has only worked at SAS for 9 months. I learned a lot about what his job entails and how he choose to major in computer science and why he has chosen SAS.  Tomorrow we will be taking a campus tour. I can’t wait to see other parts of SAS that I have not yet been.

 

Two of Dr.Goodnight’s gemstones

Day 1 at SAS

May 29th, 2019

Today is the first day of my work experience at SAS institute of technology. Since I have never been on SAS campus before, I was amazed by it’s innovative and modern glass buildings. One of the things that intrigued David and me was the letters of the buildings.  Building A was most recently built despite being the first letter of the alphabet. We would soon find out that the original Building A, B, and C actually turned into the Umstead Hotel.

We first began with an intro session lead by Ms.Woitkowski and Mrs. Daugherty, two of SAS’s University Recruiting Directors. In the intro session, I really got to understand what SAS is really about and how it is able to impact people’s lives around the world. We watched several videos including one that illustrated the destructive forces of a typhoon on the country of Nepal and how SAS was able to use data analytics to calculate the necessary resources for Nepal citizens to rebuild their home without causing damage to surrounding economies. SAS is also a really impressive private company. It returns 25%(compared to the industry average of 9%) of the revenue back into research and development to create the next best thing. SAS is also used by 96 of the Fortune 100 companies. One other thing I learned was how enjoyable it is to be a SAS employee.

After the intro session, we headed downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch. SAS offers some of the most delicious foods at cheap prices for their employees. I thought about what I should get for a very long time of 20 seconds and realized that pizza is the only correct move. After Lunch, we split up into our individual sessions. I headed over to the department of research and development with Mrs.Holland, who was a software engineer that worked on customer intelligence testing. She first briefed us on an overview of how her department ran and then introduced us to some of her co-workers. At the end of the session, she actually showed us how she is able to do some of her testing on the SAS web application. After the first day, I have only gotten more and more curious research and development.

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