This summer I was fortunate enough to be able to join Anant. Coming from primarily a research background, I had little experience of how companies run. This was a great experience for me in learning about the development cycle, how companies streamline workflow, and much, much more about day-to-day operations. And of course, meeting the team at Anant was incredible and I met some fantastic people who taught me a lot, from getting ready to go to college to general life advice.
While here, I specifically worked on the Mindy project. Mindy aims to aggregate different types of listings, such as jobs, skills, or companies, and categorize them to automatically generate connections. This summer, we focused on stage 1, which involves scraping job listings from as many sites as possible and then extracting information. This extracted information, such as social media tags and the type of the listing can be used for the pairing portion when combined with algorithms that do similar tasks for other types of data.
While I had done data science and machine learning before, I had never created a front-end display or a pipeline for the whole process like I had to do for Mindy. As a result, I got to explore some very cool technologies like elasticsearch and React to create a complete product. I also was able to go much more into depth in natural language processing, as I wrote about in a previous blog post.
At the end, I was able to help create a system that can automatically scrape information from multiple websites, process it, extract additional information from descriptions, and categorize it. This was all placed into a slick front-end, allowing for easy searching of jobs. And then came docker. Perhaps one of the more daunting and involved things I’ve done, learning to dockerize and deploy was quite a challenge. However, at the end, we were able to do it all successfully, giving easy pushing to servers and letting anyone, anywhere, use our platform in a handful of minutes.
Beyond Mindy, I learned a lot about how a business operates. Seeing how agile works, with sprints and trello integration, was a really new process to me and I was amazed at how effectively it was able to aid communication. It was also very interesting to work in a professional environment and the Anant weekly co-works were very cool.
This last summer was an experience I will never forget. From freezing with a broken AC to eating lunch by the canal to getting eaten alive from mosquitos, I wouldn’t miss a single moment of it. Anant taught me how to run a business, and how to run it well.
