Airship Industries Internship

Anna Biryukova

Contact: LinkedIn

For my capstone project, I worked as a software developer at Airship Industries. Airship Industries is a video surveillance company based in Redmond, WA, which provides video management systems to large enterprise customers. My goal for the capstone was to apply what I had learned through my CSSE courses in an industry setting, and expand my knowledge and practice of software engineering in a professional work environment.

As a software developer on the core team, I developed code for their Windows software, working with both client and server code to implement new features and fix bugs. My work involved coding with C# for Nexus Client and Metadata Server, and Delphi—a programming language from the 2001 software Delphi 6—for Airship Server and Replay Server.

During my internship, I implemented and contributed several features and fixed multiple bugs for their code base. The primary software components I worked with were Nexus Client, their client software that allows viewing of video footage and metadata; Airship Server, their server software that records and sends live and playback video; Metadata Server, a server that deals with camera metadata; and the Enterprise Management System (EMS), a web-based software that provides customers a way to manage servers, cases, cameras, users, and permissions all in one application.

By working at Airship Industries, I got to understand what it means to be a software developer. I experienced what it’s like to work with a massive code base that had been in development for over ten years, and learned to work with older development environments like Delphi 6, and what it meant to have “tech debt.” I collaborated closely with a team of software developers and worked with other company teams like quality assurance, marketing, and customer support in order to deliver software products that fit the needs of customers. I learned about the importance of backwards compatibility and that it’s critical to think about how code changes in one area can affect other parts of the system elsewhere.

At the end of my capstone, I received an offer to continue working at Airship Industries, and I accepted. The performance review from my manager and director of software development at Airship Industries, Jim Qi, indicated that my quality of work was good in their four review categories: quality of work, communication, taking initiative, and reliability.