Lessons Learned
Internships create an important link between classroom learning and how those lessons apply in the real-world. I was a sophomore at The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in business and computer engineering, when I started my Frontier Energy internship. I joined the team that develops P3, a platform that utilities use to process energy efficiency programs.
As I finish my internship and start the next chapter of my career, I’m taking three important software design lessons with me.
Takeaway 1: Flexibility is really important.
Each utility and each individual efficiency program have their own unique — and sometimes intricate — requirements to complete processes like approving work and issuing payment. For example, when approving a contractor’s work, one program might require six steps to approve work and one to process payment, and another might require two work approval steps and six for payment processing. You can’t tell a business to change their processes because the software doesn’t work that way, and you can’t make software so rigid that changing a process takes months of reprogramming. P3 uses workflows that are a series of individual, granular actions that can work the way the utility works. This was huge for me in understanding how to design elegant software and have enormous flexibility for the customer.
Takeaway 2: Design for every user.
Many people are involved in an efficiency project and the user interface needs to be easy for all of them. I built the forms that customers, contractors, and utility program administrators used to enter data that would then calculate savings. It was important to give people instructions that were clear and easy to follow, and then to make sure to validate that data. Several times I found myself so involved with the validation and calculations, that I completely forgot about the user. I learned to always put the user first, and make sure what I design makes sense for every user and all skill levels.
Takeaway 3: Energy savings matter.
When I started, I knew very little about energy efficiency. By working on P3 and the Deemed Savings Engine, I learned about how state Technical Reference Manuals calculate the savings for energy efficiency measures. It showed me the importance of replacing HVAC, water heating systems, improving insulation, and other EE measures. I’ve seen the numbers. It makes a difference for utility customers and for the world.
As I close out of my time with Frontier Energy, I am very grateful for all the lessons I learned in the last 20 months. Certainly about software development, but also about working as part of a team with a common mission and goal. The mentorship and experiences in the workforce were vital to my education. I’m lucky to have had this opportunity and I am excited to apply everything I learned as I continue to work in the software space.
Originally written by Brandon Tran, Frontier Energy — https://frontierenergy.com/blog/#lessons-learned
