It’s hard to believe that I am saying this for the last time, but hello and welcome [back] everyone! My name is Brooke Duncan and I am an intern at Agile Onboarding here in Telluride, CO. This week is officially my final week of my Pinternship, though I am really just taking hiatus before returning to finish what I am working on. On that note, I think it would be prudent to do a quick overview of the past five weeks.
My office for the afternoon.
When I first began this internship, I had some past experience in both Java and Python, though I was unfamiliar with AI implementation and manipulation. Basit, my mentor, assured me that I would be just fine with the coding knowledge I had, and that the majority of the work I would be doing would feel significantly more like research than writing code. If I remember correctly, the metaphor he used was that carpenters don’t make the nails they use, nor do they mill their own lumber, yet they use these pre-made components to construct something much larger. At that time, I did not know just how true this would be. I have spent countless hours scouring the internet for code that others have written only to later deconstruct it and extract the elements I needed. This process was both time consuming and often frustrating, but it also reminded me of something that is easy to forget when you are neck deep in all of this: there is no need to reinvent the wheel. That is to say, if the code has already been written, why spend the time rewriting it?
For the first week or two I spent most of my time learning to navigate all of the different software programs used by Basit and his team, as 
well as learning the layout of what would quickly become my main project. Going into weeks three and four, I won’t say I was lost, but I definitely did not have my feet under me. It took a few days, but eventually I got a clear(er) idea of where this was all headed, so I put my head down and got to work. In just a week and a half I had a basic, mostly functioning, framework in place. From there, I have spent my time finetuning what was already complete, as well as completely changing several components in order to improve the quality and accuracy of the program. This past week I have been experimenting with a software called AWS Flywheel, which is a way to train my own AI model using our data in order to have a more reliable, case-specific, AI model to use. Flywheels are a relatively new technology that Basit and the Agile Onboarding team haven’t used previously, so it was on my shoulders to figure out how to use it. As it turns out, nothing about it was straightforward, and I battled though a plethora of errors and other issues that were unfamiliar, and because Flywheels are so new, there was not much information available on the internet to help me out. With that said, Thursday afternoon I got my Flywheel up and running with test data we had taken from the internet. The next step is to train a new Flywheel using our data and then implement it in my program.
As I mentioned previously, this is my last week of my internship, but because I am not one to leave loose ends, I will continue to work on this project (and potentially others) for the foreseeable future. It has been an honor and an opportunity of a lifetime to work alongside such knowedgable people, and I am incredibly thankful to Pinhead and Basit Mustafa for enabling my internship to come to fruition.
Two other amazing Pinterns and I at Pinhead’s annual Science of Cocktails fundraiser!
Before I sign off one last time, I would be remiss to not recognize a few people and organizations for all of their help over the past few months. First and foremost, thank you to the Pinhead team, specifically Sarah Holbrooke. Thank you Basit and all of the rest of the Agile Onbaording team for guiding me through this project and for teaching me something new everyday. And last, but certainly not least, thank you to everyone who has tuned in over the past five weeks, and to all of Pinhead’s generous donors and supporters for enabling kids like myself to have such unique and life-changing experiences.
That’s a wrap folks! Have an amazing weekend and thank you all once again!
Brooke, so glad to hear that your pinternship was an overwhelming success!