Week 4: Middle Period
I’m almost … halfway done? Seriously, it feels like I started yesterday. Either way, big week this week.
For context, here’s a little bit more about my assignment. I’m on what they call the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in our Hyperautomation & AI (HAI) division. This means that we’re in charge of ensuring that our infrastructure & platforms are of tippy-top shape (i.e. reliable). We have various scripts running to monitor the health of our system, and alert team members in the event of an disruption. Other software developers on adjacent teams can also submit & assign “tickets” to the SRE team. Tickets are essentially requests to add/change/update something on our platform; we have a designated ticket handler that assigns team members incoming tickets according to their expertise.
Given that addressing some tickets can be very monotonous/repetitive, it warrants an automation, and this is where my project comes in! I’ve been assigned to write a Python script to pull data from a given ticket, make the corresponding addition/update to our infrastructure and platform, and then resolve the ticket. Up until now, Tanvi and I have been learning more about the infrastructure and it’s different functions and purpose. This week, we were able to begin the concrete planning phase, creating flowcharts of the workstream, writing docstrings of our script’s methods, and physically developing a script itself.
In the earlier parts of the week, there was some internal ideation for how we want the data model & script architecture to look like — i.e. defining class objects, data consistencies, & method headers. On Wednesday, we completed a bulk of the coding, frequently checking in to resolve formatting/code inconsistencies between our scripts. Thursday, we combined our scripts, identified potential shortcomings, and iterated for the next version. By the end of the week, we had completed a few calls to go over our script and how to push it further into production. Overall — a very productive, rewarding week of work!
But of course, we are interns after all. A week of work is never just work. Besides making headway on this project, I went to mini-golf with some interns, met a few Penn students working in the more clinical-y medicine-y pharma-y side of Merck, took a tour of our NASA-looking Cyber Fusion Center, got a solid meal (eggplant parmesan & nachos) for $3.89 in our cafeteria, and went to a few birthday/retirement celebrations + got some yummyyyy sweet treats. I also learned about something called INSPIRE points, it’s basically a way of rewarding team members for going above and beyond in their work. Really just some free money.
Ok I’m tired. Let’s look to the future today. No takeaways, here’s what I’m looking forward to instead:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) summit in New York!
- Our technology expo, where company leaders & employees from all IT divisions come together to learn more about what’s the latest and greatest at Merck.
- National Intern Day on July 23.
- July 4th (aka paid day off)!!!
