WIMTACH Student Profile: Suraj Regmi

Suraj Regmi will be graduating from Centennial College this year with a postgraduate degree in Software Engineering Technology Artificial Intelligence. In his 10-month internship at WIMTACH, working as a student Back-end Developer, he was able to gain a full grasp of an agile project development cycle. But when he first joined WIMTACH, Suraj hadn’t yet had the opportunity to develop a project from scratch. His involvement in a project collaboration with Canadian staffing company, Aspiring Ingenuity, in the development of a web application, gave him the full appreciation of what it takes to successfully bring about a technology project. “It was my first time working in the Agile Framework,” he said. “I got to experience it in the first hand; studying about it and working with it makes a lot of difference.”

The project collaboration with Aspiring Ingenuity centered on developing a stand-alone staffing management solution to enable Dental Practices to connect with and hire temporary staff workers. The application enables administrators to post shifts to temporary workers and send notifications through email. Acting as a product owner in the Agile Framework and a Back-end developer in the project, Suraj was able to flourish. His main role was to develop the Application Programming Interfaces (API) needed for the development team. He also developed user stories and wrote user specifications, developed tech assets, and facilitated the communication between the WIMTACH development team and the Aspiring Ingenuity team on requirements and clarifications. “It was a great experience,” he said. His participation in retrospective meetings, weekly meetings held to review the areas of improvement in the development process, were especially key for him.

For Suraj, his entire internship experience was valuable. Reflecting on his experience throughout the project, he found that this internship was rewarding because he was able to gain technical skills and connections that he didn’t have before. “The project went smooth,” he said. “I enjoyed the whole process throughout the project term.” Since he was encouraged to play a major role in the development team, he was able to assist the team in setting up some of the configurations used in the web application for the project, and as a result, improve his skills in using resources like Amazon Web Services.

As the only student Back-end developer in the project, he felt a responsibility to provide good work, so that other students would be able to understand and use his code later on. With this goal in mind, he developed code for the Back-end architecture of the application using what, he called, “clean” coding standards with Node.js and Express.js. He also used different APIs such as the Amazon API Gateway and Geo Location API for Node.js, and he configured the Front-end mobile notification feature for the application. After months of working within the WIMTACH development team, he gained an aptitude for how user stories are defined and improved his writing skills by consistently using Jira.

Ultimately, he gained professional communication skills and a familiarity with the role of a Business Analyst through consistently writing professional business emails to clients, communicating with his team and watching how development team meetings were conducted and organized.  Importantly, he got first-hand knowledge of the kinds of information that would be required in the information-gathering phase of a development project, helping him to understand when information was lacking and how to address miscommunications in the future. “I not only got to deploy new technologies, but also learned soft skills within the process,” he said.

Before joining WIMTACH, Suraj had experience in Back-end development, but he explained that his internship was especially unique in teaching him how to successfully develop a product. “We have to give our 100 percent from information collection to coding,” he said. He emphasized that to get a successful development project underway, the information-gathering phase of a project was very critical, a fact that he didn’t fully appreciate until his internship. “I think it will help me even with my career,” he said. “Even if I become a lead, I will be more careful on getting the [information] right, more than deploying a new technology for the sake of it.”

WIMTACH has proven to be the catalyst needed to build his confidence. Initially, he was quite worried about his marketability for employment, but now, with months of work experience under his belt, he is confident about finding a job after his graduation. Looking towards the next five years, he hopes to eventually join a skilled company and become a team lead. “I think WIMTACH has helped me [towards] there, even for the product owner role that I have worked,” he said. “It will also help me to get more for the positions that I applied for.”

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