[Internship] Software Engineer @ Paul Scherrer Institute

My internship at Paul Scherrer Institute.

PSI profile

PSI is the largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is part of ETH domain and has three main fields of research:

• Matter and materials – studying the structure of materials, developing new materials.
• Energy and environment – creation of sustain energy sources.
• Human health – proton radiotherapy.

It employs around 2000 people and it is publicly funded.

Software Engineer Internship

During my internship I developed a software for managing on-call responsibilities (in Switzerland called pikett) for employees. Now it is used in more than 30 departments at PSI and the tool digitalized the assignment and viewing of the on-call responsible employees, which reduced the time of assignement, prevents mistakes and situations when there is no employee on-call.

I built software for managing employees, department groups and assigning on-call responsibilities in Java. Swing with MigLayout as a GUI tools was used. The Java software provides user authentication with four types of users (Admin, Department admin, On-call changer, User) for which Apache Shiro security framework was used. The application has one centralized PostgreSQL database node. As a JDBC connector EclipseLink was used. For viewing current on-call employee within departments a webpage in PHP is implemented. In case of central database node failure, automatic Python script task creates daily a backup of websites of on-call employee for all departments. Finally, another script in Python checks each morning if an on-call employee is defined and if not, it sends an email to responsible person.

Supervisor: Daniel Kramer (daniel.kramer@psi.ch)