Rudy Zupetz Goes Above and Beyond With the Help of DaVinci

Rudy Zupetz landed the role as Technical and Value Engineer Intern at Ping. Though he had an abundant skill set already, he was given tasks at Ping to expand his capabilities. With the help of his mentors and DaVinci, Rudy surprised himself at what he was able to accomplish during his time at Ping.

Read about his experience here:

My official role at Ping is Technical and Value Engineer Intern, where I work with both our technical enablement and our business value team. A little about me: I’m a Computer Science major with a minor in business, so in this role, I expected to be able to use both of my skill sets. 

So far, it's been a perfect fit where I’ve done exactly that; programming for the technical side of the internship and using some business theory on the value side. Some of my main goals of this internship were to help the teams I’m on and to learn about how Ping operates.  I also was hoping to grow my understanding of how corporate enterprises function, as well as learn how professional programmers really operate.

Coming into Ping, I had no professional or corporate experience at all. From what I’ve heard from older friends and role models, programming commercially is a very different experience than academically, and I was unsure what to expect. But, when I sat down with my managers, Michael Sanchez and Vikas Mundada, they walked me through their expectations, laid out my tasks very clearly, and gave me all the resources I needed to be successful.

One of the first things I was assigned on the technical enablement team was to create a bot which would log in to Ping’s BX Retail demo and try to register an account. Due to the fact that this was a bot that was creating an account and not a real person, Ping Fraud would realize this and halt the account registration. I had never written a bot before, so while I was a little daunted, I was also filled with an unwavering confidence thanks to the support around me. I believe this helped me to create the bot faster then I had expected. 

On the business value side, I was initially tasked with pulling a variety of value statements from Ping’s BXDemo scripts and cataloging them into one unified place. I felt very proud of the document I ended up making and it was uploaded into Highspot. Our CEO, Andre, even mentioned the document in his June Accomplishments email! Upon seeing this, I felt validated in my success and was given the motivation to keep working as hard as I can.

I also was given the task of building a connector for DaVinci for a company called Box. The connector will allow admins to create, delete, update, list, and get users from their Box enterprise. Initially, I thought that this would be something that probably would have taken me the entire 10 weeks of my internship to create.

However, with the power of DaVinci, I was able to ultimately complete the connector in about a week and a half. 

The connector project generator in DaVinci laid out all the groundwork for me. All I was left with doing was reading through the API documentation for Box and formatting the calls to the API in order to match what DaVinci needed. DaVinci truly did streamline the entire process, so that even someone with no experience like myself could take on this task in a relatively short amount of time.

DaVinci surprised me; it allowed me to create a user journey without having to know how to code at all. You can create a deep, complex user experience that can virtually do anything you desire, so long as the connectors that you require are there. 

DaVinci truly is its own programming language that has a much lower skill floor compared to traditional languages. An analogy that I heard that I really like is that DaVinci is sort of like a lego set. You have a bunch of tools in your toolbox and you can use them to build whatever you’d like, DaVinci really is something special.

We’re always looking for talent at Ping! Interested in applying for Ping’s Intern program? We’d love to hear from you. See if we are hiring for interns near you, here!