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I worked as a Software Engineering Co-Op student at Jamesway Chickmaster Incubator Inc (JCMI). The Co-Op term was four months, from May to August 2025. I kept going casually from September to December on Agent James, a side project tied to the same group.
Lead
This entry covers the parts of the role that did not fit in the overview. It leans more on the day-to-day than the summary does.
Background
The company builds incubation equipment and the software has to work around whatever the hardware is doing. A lot of the job was understanding those constraints before writing anything.
The main thing
The bulk of my work was a service that read machine state and made it legible to the operations team. Getting the data model right took longer than writing the code.
Walkthrough / demo
Following a single reading from sensor to screen explains the design better than any diagram I could draw here.
Wrap up
The two lessons I carried out:
- Build for hardware that will drop out and come back.
- Ask the users what they need before deciding what to build.
References
- Team design notes.
- Hardware manuals for the incubators.