Lisa Byrne ’19: Summer Intern at Energy Action Partners

This summer I have been given the amazing opportunity to work for Energy Enact Partners with Scott Kennedy. Energy Enact Partners is a nonprofit organization that works with communities to help improve access to sustainable energy through the use of technology and a strong sense of community. I am working with another intern, Jingxian Hu, to develop a software tool that we called the Minigrid Game that is used for planning and designing small, independent energy systems for rural communities. Mini-grid technology is very important and effective for these types of communities because of the low population density; mini-grids expand the radius of electrification of businesses and homes without the need to be connected to a centralized grid.

Energy Action Partners is based out of multiple locations: Somaliland, Boston, and Malaysia, so teams of employees from all over the world are working towards a solution for the problem of electrification. This means that I work from home and connect with Mr. Kennedy and Jingxian over email and Skype. At first, I thought this would be very challenging because I would be working so independently and I began my internship with very little knowledge of the work that goes behind creating a game, but I rose to the challenge and discovered learning about this new kind of coding to be very self-satisfying as well as Mr. Kennedy and Jingxian to be extremely helpful and understanding in this process.

My first task was to learn a new coding language, MySQL, which I will use to build the database to collect information from the Minigrid Game. It was not very difficult to pick up the language thanks to the similarities between MySQL and JavaScript, a coding language I had learned during the school year. My next task was much more difficult as I am still learning lots of new coding terms as I go along. I had no understanding of what a repository was and I was asked to research two sites, BitBucket and GitLab, for a free private repository that allowed access for multiple members. A repository is much more simple than it sounds; it is a centralized location where data is stored. I ended up choosing GitLab for the new repository because there is no limit to the number of contributors; Bitbucket has a limit of up to five contributors for a free private repository. After that I migrated the old repository, currently stored in GitHub, another site for repositories, to the new repository in GitLab. There are a few different ways to do this. The method I used however was to “fork” the repository. A fork is a copy of a repository. Luckily, GitLab makes it very easy to migrate projects, so I uploaded the fork straight into the GitLab. Now that the new repository is set up, I am fortunate enough to have Jingxian help teach me how to navigate MySQL workbench and learn about the database in the weeks to follow.

I have learned more than I had ever expected to learn about the all work that goes behind creating a game. It is also amazing to see two very different disciplines, software engineering and renewable energy engineering, come together for a great cause. In these last few weeks, I have become more and more confident with working independently and I can’t wait to see where this leads me!