Work at NASA

An Invaluable Experience

At NASA Ames Research Center, in partnership with senior developers—who also acted as mentors—I was able to write code and features for web applications utilizing a MERN-esque, RESTful architecture, within an agile environment. The work I did was part of NASA's High Density Vertiplex Research.

I say “MERN-esque” because we used NestJS and TypeScript to build our applications—Nest is built on top of Node and Express. We connected Nest to our MongoDB database via Mongoose, and for the frontend we used React and the MobX state management library.

In short, our stack might instead be called "MRNN" (MongoDB, React, Nest, Node).

I was involved in frontend and backend tasks such as writing functions, writing styles, creating and integrating React components, implementing features to assist in the overall development process, and writing frontend and backend tests. I also touched GraphQL from time to time.

Using Git—via GitHub, Postman for testing endpoints, and going through the pull request process were almost-daily requirements.

Being introduced to these many facets of web development on the job really gave me a global understanding of the ins and outs of the software engineering process, and skills to tackle the problems faced in a professional environment alongside other developers and professionals.

In other words, the experience was invaluable—the experience gave me skills that are hard to learn from simply programming applications on your own.

I'm currently supplementing my experience at NASA by honing my skills through Full Stack open—a course that feeds and grows the roots of a web developer's foundational skillset, allowing them to be agnostic in whatever web languages and frameworks they choose to use. You can learn more about my journey through this course here.

Please reach out via email if you'd like to work with me.