During the summer of my sophomore year at high school, I had the opportunity to intern at Red Hat's Boston office. I worked on a project called the ChRIS project, a collaboration with Boston Children's Hospital, that leveraged cloud-computing to minimize brain scan times.

ChRIS is an open source framework that utilizes cloud technologies to democratize medical analytics application development. The ChRIS Store is a store for all the ChRIS plugins and a place for developers to publish their own

— Boston University Red Hat Collaboratory

I was given the task of designing and building a user interface for other developers looking to submit their brain scan plugins to the main ChRIS application. Prospective developers would submit their plugins through the website, which would help them validate their code and add it to the plugin registry.

Working on the ChRIS project was incredibly fulfilling; the code I wrote that summer will help local patients at Boston Children's Hospital and their families by reducing their agonizing wait time on brain scans.

The experience gave me first-hand experience with programming in a team environment. I brainstormed with a user interface designer on the website's user experience, reviewed the code of my co-workers, and communicated with backend designers to orchestrate a seamless integration between the frontend and backend. I even held the title of scrum leader one time when the usual team leader was absent.

And the internship nurtured my technical expertise as well. I delved deeper into the React library, learned about test-driven development in React — eventually compiling a test suite of over 300 tests, and mastered an array of essential GitHub features such as continuous integration in pull requests, rebasing, and squashing commits.

I was invited back to intern at Red Hat the following summer – I will be writing about my work that summer in a subsequent project post coming soon.