After I got settled into Premera, my team proposed a project for me to do. They wanted a web app that would monitor the health of different services that Premera uses. It would be one place for them to find all of the information they needed to see if a service was in working order or not. They also wanted to be able to view the history of those services.
At first, I was extremely overwhelmed with the idea of this project because the biggest thing I had created previously was the app for CS340… and I got to work with a partner for that one. The internship project was going to be 10 times as big as that and much more difficult. I spent the first week of the project staying up very late watching YouTube videos and getting very little sleep. I knew I wanted to impress them and to do that, I had to step up my game. No other interns were getting to do a project of this magnitude, so I had to show that I could complete it.
The first thing I needed to do was collect information to create API calls in C#. I had never used C# before, so that was another thing I had to learn quickly. I also had to make sure that usernames and passwords were hidden, so I kept all of them in an Azure Key Vault. Figuring out how to retrieve those keys was hard, but very rewarding because it kept the confidential information safe.
After getting all of the rest calls, I needed to write a function for each of them to get the exact information out of them that I needed for the web app. But I needed somewhere to store all of that information, so I created a SQL database to manage all incoming information.
Once I had all of that information, I had to create Azure Function on a timer to retrieve that information every 12 minutes. This was to ensure that the web app was functioning in real time and the information was up to date.
I worked with different people on my team for each step of this process because each of them has different specialties. I thought it was pretty cool to learn different things from each of them and they also got to learn pieces of new information from me. They were surprised that I was able to complete the backend so quickly– but very impressed with my work.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about the front-end work and show pictures of some of the finished product.
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