Summer Experience as a Media Hopper Technology Intern
My name is Kamelia Zhelyazkova and I am entering the 3rd year of a Computer Science (BSc Hons) degree at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics. My main areas of interest revolve around software development, database systems and security.
Currently, I am into the sixth week of my internship at the Digital Learning Application and Media department and I am working in a team with another intern on Media Hopper, a university platform for video and audio upload of content available both to staff and students.
I have had 2 bigger projects, one is now finalized and one is ongoing. The aim of the first project was to filter all Creative Commons license type of data, keywords in the title, tags, when content is created or changed and populate a specific channel automatically with it. For this purpose, I had to familiarize myself with the Kaltura API in order to use API calls and make a small application which runs alongside Media Hopper and performs the tasks stated. In particular, develop a way of authenticating users, making requests and receiving responses from the server in Python. This new functionality of Media Hopper was finalized on 17th of June and is expected to improve the search both for students and staff members of the university.
The second and main project for the internship was the migration of video and audio content from the old Podcast Producer server to the Media Hopper platform. Since the data stored on this server is approximately 6.5TB, we had to devise a mechanism for authenticating users so that they can have access to the content they are authorized for, rendering it as a list and letting them select the content they would like to migrate to Media Hopper. The main challenge for this project was to come up with a way to match the old and new accounts of the users. For the purpose we have created a small web application which allows staff to log in and manually select the files they would like to migrate. Particularly I have worked on the front-end using CSS3, HTML5, jQuery and JavaScript. In addition, I have made implementations on the back-end as well.
It has been fascinating working on the projects so far. I had the opportunity to work with APIs, learn Django and get experience with the process of building software in a real working environment. We expect our last project to take a bit more than a week to finalize and than we will be able to start the new one by the end of next week.
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