After IBM I wanted to try a different organizational culture for one of my next co-op work terms. I found a very different culture at The Learning Bar (TLB). I began my journey at TLB with the Title of Web Developer. My task over my co-op work term was to build a set of internal reporting tools to provide Account Success Managers better insight into clients progress with the company’s flagship product OurSCHOOL. This assignment doubled as an opportunity to test the JReport embedded reporting software for use in production.

I was very excited about the challenge that the learning bar put before me. They were looking for someone able to own a project from planning to completion. I worked closely with the Senior Account Success Manager to define the data that was important to his team. I also had to collaborate closely with the Systems and Support manager and the Chief of Client Services to understand the various data sources I would need to aggregate information from. This lead to having to learn many new collaboration tools such as Jira, Zendesk, and Zoho CRM.

I had to perform a wide variety of tasks while building effective reports to support client services. I had to set up some integrations between our collaborative tools to improve the quality of data I had to work with. This involved mostly working with third-party extensions and API endpoints with some custom python scripts to transfer historical data when possible. I also had to learn and document the use of JReport so that other developers could easily jump into using it in the future.

My work with the client services led me to a realization that the CRM software we used was underutilized and not properly configured for our purposes. I was delighted to find that my supervisor agreed with my observation and welcomed me to aid in configuring the system and working with users to define the uses that they needed from the system. I performed these duties simultaneously with my existing project.

After delivering a library of dashboards and page reports for the client services team my focuses shifted to revitalizing the reports we delivered to clients. I began working more closely with fellow developers getting them up to speed on JReport and learning more about our application code from them. I was already very familiar with our database but I hadn’t worked much with our Java and PHP codebases.

I enjoyed having the opportunity to focus more on technical difficulties. I was working with a legacy Java EE code base for the UI of the platform and PHP scripts that performed data processing. I got to experiment with different methods of integrating JReport into the application including building prototypes using an Angular frontend. I also created page reports which were delivered to customers using Jreport, implemented new features to the product, and continued to work on building CRM use among client facing teams.

After 8 months when my co-op work term was done at The Learning Bar I was offered the opportunity to continue to work part time as I finished my studies. I accepted and focused my attention back to the client facing teams to improve their use of the CRM and other collaborative tools such as Confluence and Jira. I enjoyed the mix of technical challenges and people challenges that come with implementing and customizing business tools.