Projects & Experience

As a recent Master of Computer Science graduate with a year in industry, I have experience in all areas of software engineering and machine learning, with a lean towards web development. Here are some of the things I have worked on in the last few years.

CERN Summer Student Program 2023

This summer I was fortunate enough to intern at CERN. I joined the ALICE O^2 project as a full stack web developer. I was responsible for developing and maintaining Bookkeeping - a web app used by the run control team at ALICE to keep track of activites. As well as this, I had the opportunity to shadow in the ALICE control room, gaining an understanding of how the experiment works, and how Bookkeeping was used in day-to-day operations. I published a report detailing my contirbutions to Bookkeeping available publicly on the CERN document server. In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on Bookkeeping as an open source contributor.As part of the program I also attended a series of lectures on many topics such as particle physics, physics engineering, quantum computing, and cyber security.

Africa in Science

Africa in Science (AiS) is a think tank and online platform tracking the scientific research output of institutes in Africa. The website and database was developed with an academic at the university and a group of students and launched in 2021. The database collects information about articles published in Africa on a per-country basis. Aside from being a platform for content, the web app allows users to search for a country and view a page for each country displaying its data. I was responsible for designing the infrastructure of the web app, interfacing with the database, and developing the pages that display this data.

The page contains interactive graphs and custom visualisations, written in d3js. We used NextJS for the webapp, and Prisma ORM to access the database.

One particular challenge was getting D3 and React to work together nicely, since they both modify the DOM. We used the solution broadly outlined in this medium article. We also considered using pre-made React components based on a simpler data vis library, such as ChartJS, but decided this didn't offer the flexibility we wanted.

Year in Industry - Scientific Software Developer at ISIS Neutron and Muon source

The ISIS Neutron and Muon source is a particle physics facility in Harwell UK, managed by the Science Technology and Facilities Council (STFC). I joined the Mantid Project as a Scientific Software Developer. The Mantid Project, to quote their site, "provides tools to support the processing of material science data", such as that collected at ISIS. I worked on GUI features in Python and C++. Once such feature involved implementing an Observer pattern to enable plots showing 3D data to dynamically update when their data is changed elsewhere. I beta tested this features with users to ensure the behaviour was correct, and to discover bugs (we know users use software in ways you don't expect!). During this, I discovered a bug related to deadlocking between threads. I raised this as a ticket on github and fixed the issue before the next release. As well as this, I participated in all aspects of the development pipeline including sprint planning, CI/CD, and reviewing other developers' work on github.