My Remarkable Summer at…. athenahealth!

Written By: Deven Labovitch, CIS Major, Class of 2020

This past summer I interned with athenahealth in Watertown. athenahealth makes Cloud-based software for hospitals, clinics and individual doctors. I worked in the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC monitors athena’s environments (production, staging, development, etc.) Within these environments are servers, databases, firewalls, vpns, routers, switches and much more.

 

One of my responsibilities was to improve tools that the NOC uses internally. This involved diving in headfirst and learning the structure of the code, then making beneficial changes. I used languages including Perl, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, HTML and CSS.

 

I also helped facilitate weekly change control meetings of 20+ co-workers to monitor and document changes to business infrastructure. These meetings ensure that teams all changes are approved, accounted for and executed properly.

 

Outside of my assigned tasks I spent time learning about the IT world through collaborating with teams/resources around me, and attending conferences. I learned about concepts such as breaking up a monolith into microservices, DevOps (CICD), Cloud Computing, infrastructure as code, AI, container orchestration, load balancing, Node.js and more.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed my internship because of the perspective it gave me on working at a cloud-based software company, the process used for writing software (Agile), ways in which software is deployed, and the infrastructure behind it. The more exposure I gained to new technologies and concepts, the more it reinforced for me that I have chosen a great major.

By Jennifer Graham
Jennifer Graham Associate Director, Undergraduate Career Development, Pulsifer Career Development Center