Full Stack Developer (ISEC)
Company Overview
The International Structural Engineering and Construction (ISEC) Society is a non-profit journal/publication that I worked for from December 2020 to August 2022. They publish research papers of many different topics surrounding construction and engineering and hold semi-annual conferences where authors who have had their papers published can present their works. Their website allows authors to submit their abstracts for editor and peer review and potentially accepted, in which case authors can submit the full manuscript for the same process.
My Role
I worked on maintaining and updating this website when needed, as well as managing the database which included creating a new database and pages for every new conference. I would do DevOps work such as renewing any certificates needed and generating xmls for google search results. I would respond to user questions and issues through email, sometimes leading to changes themselves. Most changes were brought up by my boss who was not a programmer so I would have to specify requirements with him and be able to communicate timelines and feasibility of tasks. Another site that I also maintained and worked on would host the author’s published works, this site was called ISEC Press.
Projects
ISEC Press was updated approximately semi-annualy, during a period of a few weeks I and sometimes one other developer would generate XMLs for every published manuscript from the conference, to be made publically available. We would create a table of contents to sort the manuscripts by topic as well as a search functionality and other features. To see the last ISEC Press volume/issue I worked on, click here.
Another significant project I worked on for my job with ISEC was a project that I built alongside the other developer who worked there at the time in which we added significant enhancements to the CRM version of the code. CRC/CRM is another company who bought access to the ISEC Society abstract and manuscript system code. Occasionally they would request special features for their version of the codebase and in this instance they had many demands all at once due to the large number of papers they received for their (at the time) latest and biggest conference. We successfully pitched and then developed features to help them manage the larger workload of the conference, and they purchased access to the new “add-on”, which met their desires.
What I Learned
Working on the ISEC society website gave me my first experience with full-stack development and web application design. I had to learn how the web development languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP in our case) all work together, and also learn to use MySQL. Working on this website was also my first look at what it’s like working on top of code other people made, which can be quite difficult. I also had to learn to make sure I didn’t inadvertently break anything whenever I added new things to the existing very large (>100,000 line) codebase, and make sure the changes would adhere to the current flow/structure of the website.
See the main ISEC Society Website