Before starting her internship, Computer Science Major Nana Amoah had experience with eight different coding languages. This spring, she focused her attention on JavaScript, using it in most of her work as a software development intern with Dose Health. This is Amoah’s second year interning with the small MedTech startup and this time around, she said, “it’s more about deepening my knowledge of databases and JavaScript than learning something new.”
In the first couple of months of her internship, Amoah helped the team at Dose attempt to integrate a Google Calendar API. “I learned a lot from it,” Amoah said, including one of the most important lessons: “learning when to stop.”
Paul Hines, Dose Health’s CEO, explained how through the work that Amoah did with the integration, they were able to determine that it was in fact not the solution they were after, allowing them to move on and find a different, better suited approach.
Building on past experiences
To work on her current projects, Amoah drew from her experiences last summer, building off the progress she had made during her first internship the previous year.
“We were using App Maker when I had just entered, and then we moved to another app making environment,” Amoah recalled. “So just the research process and finding what fit best was something I really enjoyed. Now it’s more about improving what’s already there or creating new features.”
“She really hit the nail on the head with the migration piece, between Retool and App Maker,” Hines said. “That was a long project and a really difficult one. Trying to work within the constraints of that [migration], that was a task that she did really well, really fast.”
Learning what you like
Looking back on her two years at Dose, Amoah said, she’s especially appreciated the opportunity to try different elements of software development and figure out what she’s drawn to. “Professionally, I’ve learned the kind of coding that I’m actually really interested in.”
The database work she was exposed to this spring even inspired Amoah to take a database class at school. “Those are skills that I’d like to hone, shape and improve on,” she said.
Education and programming for all
Amoah’s love for technology started when she was little; from playing around on her first computer when she was a kid to taking programming and robotics classes in junior and senior high school. Now Amoah does what she can to give similar opportunities to the kids who need it most in her community back home.
Building on work done by one of her professors, Amoah helped introduce an educational app in Ghana to address the technology gap within rural areas.
“One way in which I have tried to contribute to bridging this gap is by introducing Blocks4All to the Ghanaian community,” Amoah said. “For me, my focus was really on helping people with disabilities and not leaving them behind. But I’m also interested in building things that serve everyday Ghanaians, like games, cooking apps, things that will excite people. And also looking at the possibilities within the health sector. Now I’m thinking about how something like the devices created by Dose Health could serve the community.”
Amoah is considering grad school, hoping to stay on with Dose Health until then and helping them further develop their software.