HELLO, MY NAME IS
VINIT PATEL
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I'm a fourth-year student at the University of Arizona graduating with a degree in Computer Science. I was born in Mountain View, California and raised in the Bay Area. Growing up in the Silicon Valley made a huge impact on me, and was one of the early drivers of my decision to pursue a career in tech. Thanks to two consecutive summer internships at Cisco IOT and Cisco Spark, I've been able to understand the power of software engineering and the difference technology driven products can make in the world. During my two summer internships, I had the opportunity to explore multiple facets of software engineering and found DevOps Engineering to be one of my favorite. Through DevOps Engineering, I learned how to build deliverables quickly and create a pipeline that promoted deployment success. I gained an interest in Full-Stack development as well because I learned how to build an entire product from the front end to back end. Through Full-Stack Engineering, I gained familiarity with all layers of software development. Aside from the technical skills I acquired, I learned about the immense value that people and teamwork have above all else. This led to my understanding that great products are a byproduct of a great team culture. As I search for my first full-time Software Engineering job, I will be looking for companies/startups that have great people, products, and culture.
When I'm not coding, I'm most likely working out, obsessively refreshing Coinbase or exploring Eater looking for good food to try. I also enjoy craft brews, Netflix, and watching a lot of YouTube. When I'm not watching Full-Stack tutorials on youtube, I also watch Finance/MBA lectures and fitness YouTubers. The charities and NGO's that I care about are The Epilepsy Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wikimedia Foundation and Direct Relief.
For my second internship at Cisco, I was a part of the Automation Infrastructure team on the Cisco Spark Call platform. I created a web application that allowed for a single centric location to log all development bugs and issues. Essentially it was an internal tool that helped reduce bugs in deliverables, and increased engineering efficiency. Building this project taught me the full stack. I learned everything from front end development and frameworks, to routing and using an in-memory database. With almost complete autonomy on this project, I learned to apply agile methodologies to my own work, and to create iterative and consistent deliverables.
I collaboratively built a safety tool kit for IOS and WatchOS that provides security to people traveling alone. This idea was born after constant news regarding issues that students would face walking back to their dorms alone at night. In order to help erradicate such issues, a group friends and I worked for 36 hours straight to build this app. Things that I helped implement include automated texting, automated calling, and send location features. This was the first time I had ever built an app, and I learned Swift on the go over the course of those 36 hours. It was a great experience using software to solve real world problems.
For my first internship, I was a part of the DevOps Engineering team on Cisco's Internet of Things (IoT) platform. My initial project was to provide health monitoring of the team's Amazon and Openstack clusters. To accomplish this task I had to learn python scripting, cluster automation, and integration sanity testing. I also used Chron, Jenkins, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IAS) based tools such as Terraform and Vagrant. In order to work with cloud computing, I used many different tools ranging from Apache Mesosphere to Amazon EC2 and Docker. To tie up all the backend work of this project and display it in an insightful manner, I built an analytics and metrics dashboard using Grafana. Alongside my main internship project, I also worked on a side project that increased usability during cluster provisioning. This increased usabilty led to a 25% decrease in time spent by engineers in bringing up their clusters. Throughout the entire internship, I worked in an Agile (sprint/scrum) software development environment. Cisco's IOT platform team was rapidly expanding during my 3.5 month internship, and I noticed how arduous it was to onbaord new engineers. To help make that process easier and more efficient, I took it upon myself to document the entire infrastructure across several different products using Gliffy diagrams and Atlassian's Confluence. Towards the end of my internship, I was the goto person to onboard any new hire. Overall, I had an amazing time at Cisco thanks to great leadership and amazing team culture.
I worked as an IT consultant for the Univerity through the Federal Work Study program. I assisted in solving any technology related issues that students and faculty faced. I provided support to hardware, software, networking and account related applications. I gained strong customer service skills by solving each issue with a client-first approach.
As a freshmen computer science major, I noticed that the university had a lack of software entreprenuerial culture and no hackathons. In order to change that, I joined up with a group of like-minded students and helped start the very first Hackathon at the University of Arizona. With over 400+ people attending from all around the country, it went on to become the biggest hackathon in the American southwest. I particpated in the creation of this hackathon as an Activity and Logistics organizer. I also helped in the process of getting company sponsors for the event. During the event, I joined a team of four and helped build a web application that used Twilio's API to send daily positive messages to users. Starting the hackathon was a great experience, and as of four years later it is still going strong.
LET'S GET
IN
TOUCH!