This post details my internship experience @ CimplyFive Secretarial Services Pvt Ltd.

Hello Everyone! This post details what I had learnt during my 2 month (Jan-March 2020, May 2020 - Present) period working as an intern for CimplyFive. We were hired as a team of 2 interns (myself and Ayman Shafi) to work on a use case for the company. The use case is a labor intensive routine and our task was to automate this process and save valuable company time. (The application we built ended up completing what would’ve taken a few days in manual effort in 5 minutes :D)

Technical Takeaways

• I learnt about automating PDF parsing, i.e, extracting text from pdf files. I used the Apache-Tika pdf parser’s python wrapper, Tika-Python. It can parse PDF files with great accuracy and proved to be the perfect choice for the requirement.
  
• I became competent with NoSQL, document oriented databases and learned about building a text search engine around it. I became proficient with MongoDb and it’s text search capability. To accomplish the text search with lower overhead, I found a more pythonic way of building a document database, which was achieved with the help of Whoosh. Whoosh helped index and store parsed document content in a lightweight form using few temporary files in a very short time.
  
• It has extremely fast indexing capability and I observed it to index over 100 documents within a minute of time. Whoosh also had a full text search capability which I augmented with a custom scorer to perform rank based search. I also acquainted myself with folder traversal and modifying directory structures using the python OS module.
  
• I acquired skills pertinent to RESTful API calls, acquainting myself with this brilliant piece of software called Postman. Postman provides wonderful utility for imitating API calls and observing GET/POST results, headers etc. I administered a bunch of RESTful API calls using the Python Requests library. I also became proficient with automating the writing of reports for Domain users. This was done using the XlsxWriter plugin for Python and helped me generate color coded reports which were appreciated by the domain users at the company.
• During the process, I also gained an understanding of how to store and process data efficiently in program memory using hashmaps, tree structures, JSON files and python lists to do so.
  
• We built a standalone desktop application with a tkinter GUI and built the modules together into an executable, with the help of the PyInstaller module.
• To automate the building process after bug fixes we used Github Actions to facilitate the application build on push to the code repository. GitHub Actions were a very stimulating study as watching a release artifact get built automatically on push to the Master repository was wonderful to see happen.

Non Technical Takeaways

• I learnt how to dissect user stories into tangible research tasks, modularizing your code, test automation, logging, reporting etc.
• I picked up a lot of valuable lessons with respect to the software development lifecycle and about organizing tasks according to business priority.
• Teamwork. Working as a part of team, and taking everyone’s opinion constructively and adding it to my knowledge base was a valuable lesson.
• Professional Communication and Networking helped me foster necessary skills to improve as a professional.
• More importantly, I learnt about taking criticism constructively and using it to improve my work. I also learnt about Time Management, as a student, it is easy to fall to the habit of procrastination. But in a professional setting, I was pushed to use my time efficiently and work better.