Blake Eriks Email & Phone Number

Remote

OverviewFrom early Spring to December of 2021, I worked as a mid-level full-stack software engineer on a team under VMD Corp that was contracted by the Navy. This was my first full time position following college graduation. The team worked on a project known as LOGCOP (Logistical Common Operating Picture). I am grateful for this opportunity provided to me both by VMD and the Navy, as well as for the growth I was able to have in this position.TechnologyJava 8SpringJSF (Primefaces)XHTMLSOAP + REST API'sThe DetailsThe goal of the LOGCOP project was to increase battlespace awareness in the Indo-Pacific region. This entailed combining data pipes from a wide range of sources (fuels, ammos, ship positions, flight itineraries) into a singe database, and allow our military users to easily navigate this far-reaching data through an intuitive UI. A challenge for this project was being adaptable to changes in command - the vision for the project changed course periodically and it was important to leverage a dynamic development process to be able to satisfy these changing requirements.

Seattle, Washington, United States

OverviewIn the summer of 2019, I worked as a software engineering intern for the Amazon AWS S3 team in Seattle, Washington. This position, in contrast to my previous internship, had me working solo on a 12-week project. This removed the previous safety net of other interns on my team to rely on should I need any additional support; however, having finished the previous internship and another year of education, I was up for the challenge. The project I developed I later named SONIC, and was leveraged as a tool for performing diagnostics on availability outages in the S3 service.Technology• Java 11• AWS Cloud Services: S3, Lambda, Cloud Watch, Athena• Internal Amazon Technologies (DJS, Brazil, Timber)The DetailsMy project for this position was two-fold. The first consisted of creating a tool which would perform a dive through the layers of the request path to uncover meaningful information on the conditions of an availability drop. The data we were interested in was the user(s) experiencing the outage (getting 400 / 500 responses), how many requests they were hitting per second, what hosts were handling these requests and which were going down. With a system operating at such a large scale as S3, this information previously took immense amounts of developer time filtering through logs to uncover. With the creation of SONIC, I was able to significantly reduce time spent by developers investigating these outages.The second requirement of my project was the integration of SONIC was to integrate it into a workflow using AWS Cloud Watch, Lambda, and Step functions. I scheduled SONIC to be run when fired off by an event of system availability outage, thus removing the manual requirements of operators running the tool. The results of these automated investigations were then compiled into a weekly roll-up to be presented at ops meetings.I'm grateful for the technical and professional growth I was able to acquire in completion of this internship.

Highlands Ranch, Co

OverviewI had a blast spending my sophomore year summer of college in sunny Highlands Ranch, Colorado with VISA Inc! In this role I got to work alongside a team of fellow interns (all a year ahead of me in college course work) and develop a back-end application used internally within the company. The purpose of our application was to unify the system wherein the central storage and retrieval of logging and transactional tracing messages would take place.Technology • Java 11 with Spring 5 - Core Language + Framework • MongoDB - NoSQL Database • Kafka - Messaging Broker • JUnit & Mockito - Testing Framework • Intelij & Maven - IDE and Dependency ManagerThe DetailsThe entryway to our application embodied a RESTful API, allowing easy integration for the other teams linking up with our service. We handled the request mapping using Spring, removing plenty of boiler-plate code (thank you Spring Boot). After using Kafka to broker the messages and handle our load balancing, we then performed some business logic and message unification. If the user sent a Create or Update, the message was stored in our MongoDB database, otherwise the data was fetched for a Get, and our server sent a response code back to the user.ReflectionThis opportunity rewarded me with a range of growth, both interpersonally and technically. As my first experience taking part in team based development, I grew to appreciate the value in version control software and dependency management. We closely followed the Agile development methodology along with a test-driven development. These practices allowed us to closely monitor our progress towards the end state of our application. All of our goals were reached in the 12-week window that we worked within, and I was incredibly grateful that VISA invited me to come back the following summer.