Employee Spotlight Series: Melissa Hui
October 10, 2023
I am a Software Engineer II here at Kitu and I work predominantly on the Convoy DER product team. I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to San Diego to attend college at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where I initially declared my major as Psychology. After the first quarter, I chose to switch to Cognitive Science with an emphasis in Neural Computation. Deciding to pursue this route opened a lot of doors for me into the world of engineering because the prerequisites included a handful of coding and programming classes.
There was one final class project that I had to do that became my light bulb moment and turning point that made me realize I want to continue exploring the world of engineering and application software. The project involved building my own version of the 2048 tile game where the purpose of the game is to continually merge numbers on a tile until they add up to 2048. I was tasked with building the front and back-end development for the application. This was a solo effort and so I remember fully immersing myself into the project and spending a lot of time researching, learning, and gathering information about algorithms and best practices, and then translating that into application code. Even though it was a lot of trial and error and plenty of restless nights, I remember feeling this great sense of achievement and gratification after I finished the project.
Outside of my professional endeavors, I enjoy spending time with my close friends and family. I like to upkeep my health and fitness through strength training and sports. I also like to cook and I'm always looking for new cuisines and foods to not only expand my own palate, but to hopefully add them to the list of new foods that I want to try and make myself. A fun fact about me is that I have a fraternal twin sister and she also works as a software engineer, and my mom pursued a career in software engineering and my dad in electrical engineering. You could say that engineering runs in the family!
2. What is your history with Kitu? Tell us about your time as an intern and your transition into a full-time team member!
I was hired at Kitu as a Software Engineer intern in early 2019, very soon after graduating from UCSD. Before accepting this internship at Kitu, I struggled to find an internship that was geared towards full stack engineering so I decided to shift my focus on seeking out jobs that were more back-end focused and that would allow me to delve deeper into server-side application. When I came across the listing for this internship and saw Kitu's goals and missions, I knew that I was keen on learning more about what it meant to secure efficient and smart energy networking through the cloud and how important that role was in facilitating communications with utilities and customers.
During my time as an intern, I gained a lot of experience writing unit tests, revolving tech debt, working with Node.js, and contributing to existing application features. I was really eager to learn anything that was handed my way because it was all very new to me, and I was acquiring valuable information and knowledge every single day.
In addition, I felt like I had a really great team of coworkers around me who didn't hesitate to take a mentorship role as I was coming up to speed with them. More specifically, I do want to give a huge shout out to Kate (Kitu's Director of Engineering), who has been my main mentor and manager since day one. Kate is not only extremely intelligent and well versed in Kitu's technical goals, but also a very reliable person to go to for anything technical or general life advice. She's always encouraging me to ask the right questions and always pushing me to work towards higher goals for myself. It's been extremely reassuring to know that she has been in my corner rooting me on for this long and I don't know where I would be without her continued support.
When I did eventually transition into full time, I would like to believe it was because of my eagerness to learn and ability to produce quality work, combined with that supportive work environment. Both of those combined are what allowed me to reach that next step in my career. Since then, I've been able to work on higher responsibility tasks, take initial lead in implementing new application features and learn more about the important standards to follow like IEEE 2030.5, CSIP conformance and the importance of cybersecurity,
3. What has been the most fascinating or interesting project you have been a part of recently?
For the past few months, I've been primarily focused on a project called the Virtual Facility (VF). The VF is super neat because it acts as an entity that is responsible for aggregating a set of information for storage devices which is then presented to the utility server as a single client. It's also responsible for dispatching control information to devices in a way that meets certain requirements set by the utility server. I've enjoyed working on something that kind of embodies that aggregation procedure.
Since the VF is computational in nature and it interfaces with a lot of other Convoy DER and Citadel applications, I've been able to work on my problem-solving skills and learn more about the best algorithmic practices as well as gain experience working firsthand with other moving parts outside of my immediate project or product scope. It's been cool to see how all of the moving parts are working together in a cohesive fashion in order to achieve desired aggregation and provide control dispatch.
4. How would you describe the company culture at Kitu?
I feel very fortunate to be working with people who are not only super well qualified and motivated employees, but who are also just great human beings. Everyone communicates well with each other and is very understanding of our personal lives and that our wellbeing and mental health is always top priority. I also like that I'm able to seek out interactions that are productive, thought provoking and mentally engaging, with any of my coworkers. I'm very glad to be surrounded by a supportive group of people.
5. Do you have any advice for new professionals looking to enter the industry of the "electric ecosystem?" Is there any advice you can give on finding an internship that is a good fit?
Stay open minded and be ready to learn because when I first joined Kitu, I had little to no experience in this field, but I was intrigued by Kitu's mission to push the envelope and provide scalable and interconnected communication between DERs, EVs, and other smart energy devices. I quickly learned that the electric ecosystem was extremely intricate and super boundless. Always ask as many questions as you can because there's no such thing as a bad question in this fast-growing engineering world.
In terms of finding a good internship, the number one piece of advice that I was given and can happily pass on is to research, research, research. I understand the daunting feeling of trying to find a job, especially right after finishing school, but it'll be beneficial in the long run to do as much research as you can into potential companies, especially if their mission aligns with your interests. Make use of any resources that are publicly available such as a website, LinkedIn page, and blog posts to learn more about the company.
6. What are your goals for the future of Kitu?
Having worked here for a few years now, I've felt this great sense of collaborative energy and drive from everyone to work towards key goals and objectives. One thing I enjoy about this culture is everyone's voice is always heard and appreciated. With that said, I would love to see the company continue to grow and encourage more people to step into our world. I believe that with the right group of people, Kitu has vast potential to scale and make big moves in the energy world.
And since Kitu has been able to cultivate such a positive work environment, I've been able to push my own limits in terms of my personal growth as an engineer. I want to continue to grow as an engineer here and I'm going to continue to ask the right questions and contribute as much of my efforts to the products that really drive Kitu's mission and values.
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