5 Questions with Yash Jain
This month’s “5 Questions” interview series features one of our talented interns, Yash Jain. Pursuing his Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Mumbai, Yash’s internship project is entitled, “Cluster Deployment with Juju Charm.” The aim of this project, which he started in May, is to write reactive charms using the charm helper framework along with tests in amulet.
Before interning with HPCC Systems, Yash worked as an intern with the open mainframe project, porting kata containers to the mainframe platform. Yash has also spent some time at the VES Institute of Technology, where he worked on the development of a content management system. In addition to Yash’s professional experience, he was previously ranked 280th out of more than 100,000 participants in the TCS Codevita, a competitive programming competition.
We recently spoke with Yash to discuss his interest in computer engineering, his work with HPCC Systems and how he hopes the community will benefit from his project.
Can you please describe your internship project and what you hope to learn through it?
For my summer internship with HPCC Systems, I’ve been tasked with building the Juju charm for HPCC Systems deployment. What originally drew me to this project was its complexity. My particular project has various components and there are several cases that need to be tended to, which I enjoy doing. I also have a chance to get hands-on with the design process, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now.
What attracted you to computer engineering, and how did you first begin learning to code?
Actually, I initially did not want to pursue a career in computer engineering. I learned code during my earlier school days as part of the curriculum, but I never took an immediate liking to the field. My friends, however, all wanted to pursue careers in computer engineering so that helped steer me towards exploring the subject. After some time working with code, I discovered what I really enjoyed about computer engineering was its complexity. I love solving problems with code.
How do you think your HPCC Systems internship will help you in your career?
I think HPCC Systems will help me fine tune my craft. This year, I am aiming to concentrate on a much higher level of computer engineering, like system design and deployment. Hopefully, this will help me launch my career to the next level.
This summer, your mentor is Xiaoming Wang (Ming), who is known for working on the HPCC Systems Platform product builds, deployment and configuration tools and deployment solutions. What are some of the most important things you’ve learned from Ming thus far?
First off on a non-technical side, he’s an extremely hardworking guy, and any time I needed help Ming is always there for me.
If we get into more technical details, such as actual configurations, Ming is incredibly knowledgeable. In our current project we’ve started to have issues with storage being attached to charms and maintaining states, among other things, and Ming has been there providing insight and guidance every step of the way.
How do you think members of the HPCC Systems community will benefit from your internship project? How might your work be applied in various settings?
The current deployment is quite cumbersome. You can’t just issue a single command and expect the cluster to just work.
When you deploy Juju, it takes care of everything for you. With Juju you can just write the deployment scenario and develop a YAML file and the Charm will handle the rest for you. The provisioning of nodes, and packages to be installed are all handled by the framework. This would ideally make the life of HPCC Systems users much easier.
Want to hear more from Yash’s interview with Flavio Villanustre, VP of Technology, LexisNexis Risk Solutions? Listen to the webcast