Working at SilviaTerra as a Tech intern for the summer of 2019 was an amazing experience. As an intern, I was able to contribute directly to the team, research and work on my own project, and connect with the various members of the SilviaTerra team and learn about what kind of work they were doing.
The first project I tackled for the summer was integrating Github and Asana, the company’s work, organization, and communication tool. This integration was previously built in to Asana, and helped the team track workflow and progress in a more efficient way. When the integration was removed in an updated Asana version, the team was left stranded. I created a webhook on Github that would be triggered each time a new commit was pushed to any repo. I then set up a simple web server to receive these pings from the Github webhook. If the commit message contained a link to an Asana task, the web server would post information about the commit as a comment on the relevant Asana task. This was an exciting first task to complete as part of the SilviaTerra team, as this integration was much needed, and is used every day!
My main project for the summer was to research and then set up a Microsoft Azure blockchain tool to be used as part of a SilviaTerra initiative to create a market for carbon credits tracked on a yearly basis by SilviaTerra biometric algorithm analysis. I had some previous knowledge about blockchain from my previous summers’ internship, and it was exciting to build on that knowledge base while working on a project that SilviaTerra was completing for Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative. I set up a Ethereum Proof-of-Authority Consortium, wrote smart contract code in Solidity, and learned how to deploy this code to our private Ethereum network using Remix and using Truffle. I wrote several Javascript scripts that used Web3 and ethereumjs tools to create and send raw transactions to our smart contract.
SilviaTerra was such a rewarding internship experience because the projects I worked on were directly contributing to company success and helping their partnership with Microsoft. I was given the opportunity to explore new tools and languages that I then used for my projects, which was a great way to really learn them and understand how they work. As a tech intern I worked mostly with Mike, who was a great resource for project advice and debugging help. I am excited to watch where SilviaTerra grows in the future, and grateful to have been a part of that process this summer!
