My name is Nate Sookwongse. I am a third-year undergraduate student of UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Initially enrolled as a Mechanical Engineering student, I have found my passion in programming, and decided to major in Computer Science instead.
For the 2016-17 school year, I was an online AP Computer Science Teaching Assistant for Edhesive. I was able to help guide and support over 1,500 enrolled high school students and teachers. This included debugging students' programs (and helping teach first time programmers how to debug), clarifying topics, and emphasizing good coding practices. This job actually played a large role in convincing me to switch majors to Computer Science. I took AP Computer Science back in 10th grade and loved the class. But I hadn't really touched programming since. Being a TA allowed me to brush up on my Java skills (which also helped me in my Android development side projects) and re-discover my passion.
In February of 2017, I began working part-time as a Software Engineer Intern for the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Center at UCLA. I've learned so much on the job. Going into the internship, my only experience in web development was from attending a club-hosted workshop. I had never even heard of terms like JQuery, React, or MongoDB. I didn't even know the difference between front-end and back-end development. But the great thing was that I was assigned to projects with a solid foundation already developed. So even though I had never touched the languages/frameworks being used, I could take a quick introduction tutorial (to understand the basics like syntax) and then dive right into the current codebase to gather a better understanding of how the languages and frameworks were being implented thus far. And whenever I'm stumped when adding a new feature or fixing a bug, a quick Google/StackOverflow search often gives me enough information to apply to my own problem.
For the summer of 2017, I was supposed to work full-time as Android Engineer Intern for Kamcord. Unfortunately, they had to cancel it last minute due to budgeting concerns. But luckily I was given the opportunity to continue working at the NIH BD2K Center full-time during the summer. I was assigned to work on MetProt, a web application which provides easy-to-use tools for analyzing metabolomic and proteomic time-series datasets. Each analytical tool uses an R script which executes on the server and then passes back the results to the front-end to be rendered in visualization plots with d3.js. I proposed for React.js to be used for the front-end of the application instead, to make the user interaction smoother and keep the entire process interconnected. Since I had never worked with React before, I followed some tutorials, and then I restructured the entire front-end of the application to implement React with Redux. I really enjoyed learning and working with React, and it made web developemnt much more fun for me as it introduced familiar OOP principles from Java and C++. Before the internship ended, I was also asked to give an Introduction to React workshop and lead a hands-on presentation and demo.