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I worked as a Software Engineering Co-Op student at Jamesway Chickmaster Incubator Inc (JCMI). The Co-Op term ran four months, from May to August 2025. After that I kept working casually from September to December on a side project called Agent James that grew out of the same team.
What I Did
Most of my time went into building and maintaining internal software that supported the incubation hardware. The work sat between the embedded side of the business and the tools the operations team used every day.
Background
Incubators run for weeks at a time and the software has to keep pace with the machines without interruption. The problem I picked up was making that data easier to read and act on for people who were not engineers.
The main thing
I shipped a set of services that pulled readings off the machines and turned them into something the team could actually use. The interesting part was the mismatch between how the hardware reported state and how a human wanted to see it.
Walkthrough / demo
The clearest way to explain the flow is to trace one reading from the machine through to the dashboard. That path touched almost every piece I worked on.
Wrap up
Two things stuck with me:
- How to build software that has to tolerate hardware being flaky.
- The value of talking to the people who use the tool before writing any of it.
References
- Internal design notes kept by the team.
- The hardware documentation that came with the incubators.