Michelle Gee Talks About Expanding Her Software Engineering Repertoire

Part of working in the tech industry means that even after you’ve perfected a set of skills, there will always be more to learn. This was Michelle Gee’s experience as a Solutions Architect Intern at Ping, where she had the opportunity to hone in on her current skills, but also, work with Ping products like DaVinci to take learning to the next level. 

Read about her experience here:

My name is Michelle Gee, and I’m a senior at Tufts University studying Computer Science. Prior to starting my Solutions Architect internship at Ping, I began my professional career as a Solutions Architect Intern at Amazon Web Services (AWS). There, I discovered my passion for interfacing with end users, cybersecurity, and collaborating with interdisciplinary teams. After my internship with AWS, I explored other options within the IT field and found myself at RSM as a Technical Consultant Intern. There, I gained more industry-level technical skills in networking, cybersecurity, and information technology. 

I stumbled upon Ping’s summer internship program through LinkedIn and applied.  My previous experiences have led me to want to explore Solution Architecture as a future career, and Ping’s strong reputation in Identity and Access Management further convinced me to apply.

At Ping, I work as a Solutions Architect Intern. My personal goals throughout the internship were to gain more industry-level technical experience, work on my soft skills, and further hone my sales skills. I wanted to work on confidently weaving together a storyline, mastering the art of saying just enough, and piecing together cohesive narratives while driving business value by addressing pain points. Throughout the internship, I expected to do some building regarding DaVinci, gain more knowledge on the IAM and cybersecurity field, and do some shadowing on customer calls.

As mentioned, I wanted to focus on improving my soft skills and sales skills throughout the internship. As a result, my first big project was to work on analyzing the platform Reprise. Reprise is a low-code, no-code platform for custom live and guided demo creation. Reprise allows users to create scalable and repeatable demos in a controlled environment. 

One of the pain points we experienced is that on customer calls with account executives, customers are interested in demos. However, setting up PingOne for a basic flow can be challenging, and requesting the help of a solution architect to showcase a demo for a first meeting can be time and resource-consuming. 

My goal was then to determine and show the value of Reprise through showcasing the basic PingOne solution; through demoing user registration, MFA, and SSO on the Reprise platform, we were able to determine if using Reprise was a good fit for Ping to use for demos in order to enable others to easily set up a demo and save time and resources. After analyzing Reprise for the past several weeks, my recommendation is to revisit Reprise in about 9 to 12 months. The product is incredibly valuable for creating controlled, linear, interactive click-thru demos in a fail-safe environment, however, the lack of documentation for more wide-branching and dynamic use cases, buggy platform, and the UI facilitating more linear experiences was something to consider.

Here is a quick video of how I can create demos on the fly with Reprise: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eW87j5zb-5eWrGe3MInMdnK8V-dEzEzs/view?usp=sharing

When I first started working with Reprise, some of my biggest challenges and concerns were first learning how to use the Reprise platform. I wanted to ensure that my analysis of Reprise was thorough and wide-reaching as my review of Reprise would determine whether or not Ping Identity would buy this third party product and use it for demos. 

But, familiarizing myself with a platform I never had experience with was quite challenging, and I felt the pressure to fully understand the user experience when using Reprise. There was a significant learning curve. However, I had great resources available to me—such as the Solutions Engineer I was working with, Dakota Leonard—as well as the online documentation. Because I had many resources at my fingertips, I was able to overcome those challenges.

I like that DaVinci is a no-code platform that is easy to use. It's easy to view my logic flow through the clean and user-friendly interface. Furthermore, I appreciate how DaVinci is easily applicable to many different use cases; from using DaVinci for orchestrating workflows for SSO and MFA, to using DaVinci for customizing and automating Google documation. Although I have only had a short amount of time exploring DaVinci, I found it to be an amazing product to work on my coding creativity with, and see the tangible, satisfying end results.

My biggest takeaway so far is the amount of learning that exists in this industry; that I’ll always be in a constant state of learning. As my manager, Jeremy Carrier likes to say, “It's like drinking from a firehose.” There is so much knowledge and information to soak in–it can be incredibly difficult to retain some or even most of the information thrown at us.

But, with DaVinci, I was able to easily and quickly implement cybersecurity and MFA concepts through a tangible platform. Within a few moments, I was able to spin up an SSO (Single Sign On) and an MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) environment. Having DaVinci as a platform to see these cybersecurity concepts has made learning and absorbing this information so much easier.

I find it incredibly exciting to be working on something that is going to be so impactful. Using Davinci has made this experience far less intimidating because of how easy it is to use and how I am able to quickly and tangibly see the results of my work. I am so excited to continue working on DaVinci and I cannot wait to see what else I’ll learn from this experience. 

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.