Fall 2022 Fellow Reflections

Fall ’22 engineering fellow Shyla Sharma reflects on her fellowship

By Shyla Sharma Dec 9, 2022

Shyla Sharma is a senior at the St. Edward's University and studies Computer Science and Mathematics. She served as the Tribune’s Fall 2022 Engineering Fellow. Learn more about Shyla here.

What was your path to the Tribune? Why did you want to apply?

I am currently a senior Computer Science major at St. Edward’s University. Last semester, I took a Software Engineering course, where my main role was as a DevOps engineer on my team. Ashley attended my final presentation, and she reached out to me after regarding an engineering fellowship at the Texas Tribune. At first, I was a little hesitant to apply because I had no experience in journalism, but I am very glad I did! I was looking to gain experience in the Software Engineering industry, and the Texas Tribune was such an amazing place to start.

What did you do during your fellowship? What have you learned?

Throughout the course of my fellowship, I have worked on a variety of projects, ranging from working on the Fall Membership Drive to developing Slackbots. My main project was designing two different Slackbots for our engineering team.

The first Slackbot receives security vulnerability alerts from GitHub and then sends messages to our channel if there are any high or critical alerts. It also creates a record in Airtable with information about the security vulnerability. I would like to pursue a career in cybersecurity, so being able to work on a security related project was really cool!

Slack message that notifies the team about a high security alert — An example of a Security Vulnerability Alert 🚨 notification message

The second Slackbot was designed to clean up one of the Slack channels for the engineering team. We had been using the GitHub Slack app to receive notifications about events in our repositories, but most of them were from dependabot (which sent out alerts about vulnerable dependencies or code in a repository). The Slackbot was able to webhooks from GitHub and filter out pull requests and branches that were created by dependbot.

I was constantly learning throughout my fellowship. Being a part of the engineering team really let me explore a wide variety of projects, so I learned a lot about both front end and back end development. I was also exposed to so many different softwares, including Docker, Django, and Google Cloud Platform.

What was the most surprising part of the fellowship?

The most surprising part of the fellowship was the inner workings of the engineering team. Everyone was so supportive and always willing to help! There was constant communication, and I never felt afraid to ask for help. It was always interesting to hear what everyone was working on during our sprint planning sessions and stand-ups.

I was also surprised by how easily I was able to personalize my projects to fit my interests. I have a strong interest in cybersecurity, and the engineering team (S/O to Ashley and Brandyn) really worked to find projects that were related to that.

What is your favorite memory from the fellowship?

I have quite a few good memories from the fellowship. I think my favorite one would have to be the Tech Team Social. Because I worked remotely, this was the first time that I met the engineering team in person. It was really fun to get to know everyone and just hang out outside of work. One of my coworkers didn’t realize that I lived in Austin, so he was quite shocked when I showed up!

A very close favorite second memory would have to be my knowledge share about GitHub Copilot, which is an AI pair programmer. Ashley had asked me to explore and make a presentation about the security and privacy concerns surrounding GitHub Copilot. I was a bit nervous about presenting to the engineering team, but everyone was really supportive. I had also added memes throughout the presentation, so it was quite fun!

What is your advice for anyone applying?

Do it! I have learned so much over the course of this fellowship and met so many incredible people. The engineering team is absolutely amazing and everyone is so supportive. The Texas Tribune is a place where you can really explore your interests and it provides so many opportunities to learn new skills.

If you are feeling unprepared or unqualified, apply! Software engineering is such a large field, and you are constantly going to be learning new skills and technologies. I had no experience with Docker or Slackbots or Google Cloud Platform before this fellowship, but with the support of the engineering team, I was able to learn those skills.

And if you are worried about not having a background in journalism…apply! I had no experience in journalism before I was a fellow here. It was honestly really cool to learn about how computer science can be applied to journalism.