Software Engineering Intern
Web APIs for a system migration, and 12+ bugs hunted across four languages and three architecture layers.
- Type
- Engineering
- Where
- Ansys
- When
- May 2024 → Dec 2024
- Duration
- 7 mo
- Location
- Austin, TX
The brief
Ansys builds engineering simulation software — a codebase measured in decades, where a C++ core, a C# service layer, Python scripting and an Angular front end all have to agree with each other.
I worked on a migration: standing up .NET and C# Web APIs to replace older interop paths, and moving data between microservices over gRPC and COM. The other half of the job was debugging, which in a codebase that size is mostly an exercise in not trusting the stack trace.
What I did
- Implemented .NET and C# Web APIs for system migrations, using gRPC and COM interfaces to move data between microservices.
- Closed 12+ bugs spanning C#, C++, Python, JavaScript and Angular, using dynamic tracing and memory profiling to locate faults across architecture layers.
- Built REST/MVC request paths for asynchronous work, batch-script automation for file deployment, and IronPython scripting hooks for simulations.
Measured
Architecture
In hindsight
The bugs that cost the most time were the ones where the symptom and the cause sat in different languages — a C# lifetime assumption that only showed up as a C++ crash. I'd invest earlier in reproducing across the boundary rather than instrumenting each side separately.