Viasat

During the summers of 2017 and 2018, I worked for Viasat, a satellite operator. Specifically, I worked for the Antenna Systems division in Duluth, Georgia. This was a really great summer job as it was close enough that I could continue to live on campus while I worked.

During both summers I worked on the Station Control Software team, where I developed a piece of software called FaSTT, the Firmware and Software Tracking Tool. Antenna Systems created large satellite antennas for many customers, and the basic problem was that we had no central database that knew what versions of what equipment and software were installed at various sites. With another intern, I created a tracking system and web portal to solve this problem. It also offered a number of reporting tools to do things like compare two different sites, or report on which versions were out of date. During the first summer we enjoyed quite a lot of success. The took was built with MongoDB, ExpressJS, JQuery, and NodeJS and was hosted on AWS EC2 instances.

I came back for a second summer and things became more difficult. The primary customer for this tool was the field group responsible for maintaining the antenna systems in the field, and they got a new manager in the year between the two summers. The new manager was much less interested in the project, and was at times actively hostile to my efforts. Additionally, the security group began to require strict security measures such as 2FA, which made implementation much harder and caused more frustration for the leader of the field team. We did succeed, and by the end of the summer the tool was being rolled out to a larger area, but it was quite a challenge.

Cool moments at Viasat included attending the launch party for the company’s Viasat-2 satellite, and the two fantastic hackathons that I got to attend in San Diego!