Meet the Interns Pt. 4: Victoria Atria

Victoria is a last-year software engineering student at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. She develops backend software with Go and optimizes projects requiring heuristics. She enjoys traveling, reading novels, hiking, and playing football

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The Project

Victoria was assigned to a data integration project that pulled data from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) into Nirvana.

Nirvana leverages multiple data sources to improve insurance risk assessment. One of these sources is the DOT Licensing & Insurance website. The DOT website provides information on carrier authorities and previous, pending, and active insurance for fleets. Until recently, this information was cumbersome to obtain and infrequently refreshed, meaning that at Nirvana, we often could not work with the latest information. However, the DOT moved this information to a new website a few months ago.

Nirvana was looking to vet and pull the data from this new website since it’s easily accessible, frequently updated, and already unified. The plan was to establish the new website as the latest source of truth for past and current fleet insurance and reduce the data pull time to a few minutes (if not seconds). We also wanted to include new real-time features such as storing and alerting relevant fleet change events.

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The Challenges

To the team’s delight, the new site was being updated daily, which significantly improved the information’s relevance. While this new site provided more and better data, it was evident that it was still “in the works” because of its recent launch.

Victoria had to resolve data quality challenges as much of the data had no descriptions or explanations. She had to immerse herself in the world of trucking insurance to uncover and understand the data available. The first few weeks were dedicated to deep data analysis as she vetted the new data against existing information to understand what changes were being made to the information available. She also had to write code that could be easily updated in the future as the DOT site eventually improved.
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Victoria’s team decided to build a data-pulling service that ran several times daily to fetch all files of interest from the new DOT site. Processing the file caused memory issues. Additionally, as the puller runs quite frequently, one of the requirements of this project was to only store files that are different from the ones already in storage. Storage optimization required the implementation of complex deduplication logic that would not impact performance.
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The Solution

Victoria’s team built the service to upload files to an AWS S3 bucket and store the content in a database. Initially, the service processed files in their entirety, which meant that memory usage was not optimal. As a solution, the team made the service read files in batches and leveraged S3’s multipart upload to avoid loading the entire file into memory at once.

Every time a file is fetched, a checksum algorithm is calculated based on its content and uploaded as part of the file’s metadata to avoid data duplication in storage. This allows the puller to compare the checksum with the previous file, ensuring that the puller only stores what is necessary.

While pulling these files already adds great value, Nirvana has only just scratched the surface as to how it can leverage this new source of information!

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Why Nirvana

“I’ve always had a strong passion for coding as a practical solution to real-world problems. This fueled my interest to intern at a company that shared this focus, leading me to Nirvana. What stood out to me was their product-oriented approach, ensuring that my work would have a meaningful real-world impact. Its global nature also caught my attention — the prospect of collaborating with engineers worldwide was genuinely exciting. Finally, I greatly appreciated the flexibility they offered; while most backend development is in Go, I was reassured that prior experience in Go wasn’t a prerequisite. Nirvana values the learning journey, making it an ideal place for interns to enhance their skills.”

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Life at Nirvana

“From day one, I was embraced by the incredibly supportive team at Nirvana, who were always eager to guide me through any queries I had. Their collective knowledge made them valuable resources for just about anything, and I appreciated the collaborative spirit within the team. Building connections extended beyond the professional realm, and I enjoyed bonding with the entire Chile team during our after-office get-togethers. The hybrid work culture at Nirvana was a game-changer, allowing smooth collaboration with teams across different countries. My internship was a rewarding experience, serving as a platform to sharpen my software development skills and immerse myself in the vibrant startup culture that Nirvana fosters.”
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