Adesuwa as a Software Developer at Principia College

Adesuwa Dawodu worked at the International Students Programs Office at Principia College from April 2022 till September 2023 as a lead web developer. She worked on maintaining and optimizing the department's wordpress website, optimizing it for speed and performance and creating custom wordpress plugins.

She also helped develop a proprietary budgetting web application that was created by the then head of the department, David Njau. This app was built to help international students overcome financial pressures and meet payment deadlines by providing them with a clear forecast of their finances.

As lead developer, Adesuwa also handled database creation and maintenance, automated testing and deployment pipelines. This was a role with lots of responsibility and pressure. There were many deadlines to be met, and bug fixes and feature updates were rolled out to the student body on a continuous basis. The automated testing pipeline was facilitated using Chai and Mocha for frontend unit and integration testing, Karma for the full system testing, and PHPUnit for the server testing.

Additionally, she wrote the client-facing part of the web app using a javascript framework she preferred, Vue.js. The UI design was created by other student workers in ISPASO and handed over to Adesuwa for implementation. However, she made suggestions based on her experiences and frustrations using difficult websites.

For the backend server, PHP was used. Ideally, a node.js server would be used in this situation and express.js would be used for route handling. However, due to server limitations at the time, it was not possible to install node, so PHP was decided on.

In this role, Adesuwa's interpersonal and communication skills were called into action as they were required to resolve many issues and communicate the team's needs across the organization. In this, Adesuwa excelled. There were times compromises were made. Due to her many skills, Adesuwa was able to ensure that the aims of ISPASO were reached while keeping other parties happy.