Vimbly Group Internship

Description Vimbly Group is a technology-oriented business-growth company. We believe that technology is the key ingredient to better than linear growth. As such, Vimbly Group partners with businesses from an ever-widening range of categories to identify inefficiencies in their operations and then develop unique technologies that resolve them and realize significant sources of new revenue. My Work Summer 2021 In the summer of 2021, I interned as a software developer at Vimbly Group where I began on the Oxford Lending platform. This service provided short-term loans to individuals in as quick as 24 hours. My first task was to configure an Olark chat system on the landing page to increase customer service outreach and help more potential customers acquire our services. Upon the installation of the chat feature, we wanted to migrate the transcripts to our customer service employee portal instead of to the Olark account. To accomplish this, I was able to utilize a webhook that transferred chat transcript data to our portal and displayed it to the employees. This reduced contact time per inquiry because employees were alerted to a new inquiry immediately without having to switch to another platform. Another item I worked on in the summer of 2021 was a Shopify application for Mobile Text Alerts (MTA). MTA is a platform that allows our customers to send text messages en masse to their customers. The goal of the application was for shop owners to send text messages to customers about abandoned cart items, upcoming sales, and order information. I implemented a login page for the MTA application through the Shopify business portal so customers could remain on their business page. The login system utilized Next.js and pre-existing MTA login REST APIs. My first software internship experience at Vimbly went well. The small company vibes allowed me to work directly with my manager, thus progress was quick and I was learning something new every day. My manager and the CTO were quite supportive and impressed with my output and they welcomed me back the next summer in 2022. Summer 2022 In 2022, I worked primarily on MTA beginning with a machine learning project to detect spam SMS messages before we sent them out through communication providers such as Twilio. I equipped AWS Sagemaker for the benefit of easy integration with the pre-existing AWS infrastructure, state-of-the-art machine learning models such as AWS BlazingText for text classification, and rapid retraining and deployment to an endpoint. The biggest challenge was sourcing data to train and test a model. We needed a large sample of data for the most robust results, however, even by combining the data we collected from our communication API partners and data sourced online we were only able to gather 15000 data points. Nevertheless, I researched the best models to use given out data and desired output and tested several before presenting the best two solutions to my managers. The AWS BlazingText model performed well with 84% accuracy, yet this was outperformed by the AWS XGBoost model which yielded 94% accuracy. In the end, I advocated deploying both models in the background to collect data live for retraining and retesting purposes. My next task was to augment the automated replies page with a default reply feature to send to customers who respond to a text message. I leveraged Typescript and Node.js to enable the response functionality, and I updated the frontend user interface using React.js and Tailwind CSS. To wrap up the item, I added end-to-end tests using Cypress to support code maintainability and ensure that the user experience is uninterrupted by future updates to the page. Final Results and Impact I learned a lot from Vimbly Group beyond software development. The most important lesson was communication: every team member has a voice and an opinion that they bring to the table so everyone must be involved in the decision-making process. Having open communication in the team fast-tracked our progress and not only did we learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, but the quality of work was stellar and always on time. For a small company, Vimbly has a ton of heart.