Ask the Interns: Sonam Kindy

by Delphix on September 16, 2019

Pictured left to right: Garrett Rodriguez, Grant Parton, Tulsi Jain, Tanya Alexandra, Allan McKillop, Pearl Ruparel, Sonam Kindy, Claire McManus, Uzair Inamdar, Michelle Feng, Ellen Wiberg, Brandon Lim

What inspired you to join Delphix?

I was looking for a summer internship that would give me the opportunity to work on an impactful, real-world project while receiving dedicated mentorship. One of my peers in school, Neal Quigley—who had interned at Delphix last summer and recently became a full-time employee—spoke so highly of his experience that I jumped at the opportunity to accept his referral. While I interviewed and received offers from other companies, Delphix was my first choice because of the internship program’s focus on providing quality mentorship and real projects.

What project was your internship focused on?

For my internship project, I added support for Enterprise Password Vaults (EPVs) to Delphix Masking. An EPV allows the retrieval of credentials without requiring the need to store them within Delphix’s Masking Engine database. The project was threefold. It involved:

Building an API by which customers could create, retrieve, update, and delete actual credentials (for legacy support) or the information necessary to retrieve credentials stored in an EPV vault.
Integrating the use of a library to validate and retrieve EPV credentials.
Incorporating these changes to perform actual in-place and on-the-fly masking jobs for database and file connectors.

Without going to deep into the technical details, it also involved code clean-up and designing and implementing the credentials such that they could be shared across connectors. In sum, this project paves the way for customers already using EPVs to securely manage their credentials, while allowing continued support for customers who want to directly provide credentials to Delphix.

What is the biggest challenge you faced and what did you learn from that experience?

Navigating the codebase. Although I had prior experience with Java, it was purely in an academic setting, so most of the technologies used, like Swagger and Hibernate, and API development specifically in Java, were very new to me. Being able to make sense of the application architecture early on in my onboarding process was invaluable and helped me think through how the project would fit into and impact the masking product at large, once it came time for the project design and implementation.

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What key skills and/or experience have you gained from your time at Delphix?

Being able to receive feedback and learn from other engineers on the team. School group projects do not hold a candle to this experience. The insight you gain from engineers working in the industry about the quality of your design and actual implementation (code) is priceless.

What’s one thing you wish you knew before starting this internship?

Being realistic about the project scope. I came into the summer thinking I needed to (and that I could) fully complete my project. In reality, the expectation was not that you complete the project full-stop. Instead, my manager, my mentor and the rest of the team wanted me to learn as much as I could and and tackle any challenges thoughtfully and steadfastly.