Ben Drees Email & Phone Number

Stevens Point, Wi, Us

Stevens Point, Wisconsin, United States

Appleton, Wisconsin, United States

Full time summer internship at Thrivent financial. My main project was to migrate two pseudo-legacy Spring Boot apps from soon-to-be shut down Docker servers to Openshift. Day-to-day work involved a lot of reading documentation and analyzing existing dependencies to preserve functionality. The migrations also consisted of several upgrades to add security, remove reliance on legacy system, and comply with new standards. Due to the nature of the project I touched many different software tools to properly test and implement new changes. Some of these technologies included RabbitMQ, Bamboo, MongoDB, ASG-Zena, Aqua, and Terraform.In addition to the technical portion, I developed many soft skills. I would often have to condense my research into a digestible paragraph to pitch to my manager. These changes and insights also took the form of new documentation for the apps. Being integrated onto a large, mostly hybrid, developer team, I also quickly became proficient in navigating Microsoft Teams and collaborating with coworkers across the country.

Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States

Full-time summer internship at Schneider trucking. Worked primarily on improving and replatforming components of their truck ETA estimation engine (ETAi). The existing code was written more as a proof of concept but was quickly deployed when it showed dramatic results. My intern team of 3 was able to start the process of relooking at these original Python scripts and move portions of it to the company standard of Java Spring Boot. We also created two new APIs to expose ETAi functions with value for other parts of the company. The improvement task was done through code optimization. By tweaking data access functions, adding Redis data caching, and by logic simplification we were able to improve performance of these services by over 300% (over an hour of server time per day) with no loss in functionality. Some of the software tools we used were Postman, SQL, OpenShift, and JUnit. As a small team of 3 interns, teamwork was an important skill. We worked together in person everyday, bouncing ideas off of each other and helping with the tasks. With no one of us having more experience than the other, there was a lot of compromising on ideas. By the end we worked as a well-oiled machine and as friends.

Appleton, Wisconsin, United States