ATS' Jake Kindley Earns Triton Student Employee of the Year Award

Academic Technology Service's Student Engineer Jake Kindley is the recent recipient of the 2022 Triton Student Employee of the Year Award for the Chief Financial Officer VC area.

Part of the experience of working at IT Services is recognizing extraordinary talent when we see it. Academic Technology Innovation's Student Engineer Jake Kindley certainly earned this honor as the recent recipient of the 2022 Triton Student Employee of the Year Award for the Chief Financial Officer VC area.

When Jake first joined the Academic Technology Innovation team last year, he was asked to continue work on an application that allows instructors to easily upload grades from the assignment system for the JupyterHub interactive computing platform known as nbgrader to Canvas, the learning management system used by all UC San Diego students. Jake not only completed the application, he improved its performance, handled edge-cases the team didn’t anticipate, and applied test-driven development techniques. As a result of Jake's hard work, the team was able to even submit a proposal for the 2022 Canvas InstructureCon conference, so that other schools could benefit from Jake’s software.

"Jake Kindley is the highest performing student we’ve hired into the role of IT Services Student Engineer," said Manager Paul Jamason. "We've been fortunate to always have great student hires, but Jake is undeniable in his abilities. No matter what complex task the Academic Technology Innovation team has given him, he’s been able to perform it, all while exceeding our expectations."

For his efforts, there were at least five complex technologies (Javascript, Python, Kubernetes, Docker and SQL) that Jake knew very little about, yet he was able to learn these simultaneously, integrate them, be productive and develop a level of mastery over them, while having a great attitude about it.

Jake’s work demonstrated he was capable of completing challenging projects, becoming a trusted DevOps engineer to be relied upon. To his credit, his work assignments are comparable to our full time staff. Jake worked with a UC San Diego instructor to develop a cutting-edge feature to spin up Dataverse research data repository instances (https://dataverse.org/) on the Data Science and Machine Learning Platform (DSMLP) without staff intervention. The instructor and teaching assistants were unfamiliar with deploying the technology, but Jake was again able to develop and set up infrastructure to do this on his own.

"Jake has also been very flexible with the changing standards of our team," Paul added. "We’ve grown from just having one to two student engineers to five, and as such, the processes by which our team manages projects have also changed. We went from informal meetings discussing projects to a more formal system of managing projects with full documentation, code reviews and reports. Jake's ability to be agile and adapt to the new environment demonstrates his commitment to our team even as its methods change."

Jake’s accomplishments have added needed functionality to the services provided by Academic Technology Services to thousands of students and instructors, while also improving their quality and reliability. 

"I've been working here for a year now and it's nice to see that my work is making an impact here and being recognized for it," said Jake. "I really appreciate my supervisor Paul Jamason for making a very comfortable work environment, and I'm also very thankful for Wesley Uykimpang and David Andersen mentoring me and helping me learn all the tools and skills needed for the job. I figure if I'm going to do something then I should do it the best I can. I always try to push my bounds and learn whatever I can; that way even if I fail at a goal or task initially, I'm still growing and will be better equipped to handle it in the future."

Is it any wonder Jake earned the Triton Student of the Year award? Jake is currently away for a summer internship but will return in the fall for more DSMLP improvements. Thank you for advancing IT Services’ mission, Jake!

This recognition comes with a campus announcement and Triton Student Employee of the Year Award Blink page, as well as a personal plaque and commemorative shirt.