Tell me about an initiative where you had to build a new system, service, or component from scratch

In my first year, I built a small internal tool to validate CSV uploads before they were imported into our test environment. The request started as 'make uploads less error-prone,' so I first sat with the engineer doing the imports and mapped the few checks that were causing the most rework. I built a simple web page that handled one file format, added clear error messages, and left room to extend the validation rules later instead of trying to support every possible case. When I found that real files had inconsistent headers, I created a few targeted test cases, got quick feedback from a teammate, and updated the parser before release. After launch, I watched the logs and checked back with the user a week later; the manual fixes dropped a lot, which told me the tool was actually helping rather than just existing.

In my second internship at a healthcare startup, I was asked to help build a simple appointment reminder service because the support team was manually sending texts and missing a lot of follow-ups. I worked with one engineer to figure out the basic flow, then I built the first version of the service to read upcoming appointments from our database and send reminders through a messaging provider. I kept the first release small on purpose: one reminder type, one clinic, and a clear status page so the support team could see what was sent and what failed. I ran into an issue where some patient phone numbers were stored in different formats, so I added a cleanup step and tested it with real examples from our data. After we launched, the support team told us they were spending much less time on reminders, and I felt proud that something I built from scratch was helping a team that worked directly with patients.