Poole IT students win Credit Suisse Campus Coding Challenge

Dylan Ryan and Daniel Marko, Poole College seniors majoring in business administration with the college’s information technology concentration, won the Credit Suisse Campus Coding Challenge for NC State students.

The competition challenged students, working in teams of two, to build a student dashboard that met a number of functional requirements and provided no specific method or platform for completing the project.

In developing their response to the challenge, Ryan and Marko identified the problem that students, teachers and administrators face every day, which is the difficulty of managing college academics and activities. They created a dashboard that brought both activities and academics into one display.

To create their solution, they chose to contemporary techniques that included a NoSQL (not only SQL) database, which allows for greater flexibility than SQL.

Developing their dashboard proved to be a tremendous learning experience, they said. Both had prior experience with SQL databases, but “almost none with NoSQL,” Ryan said. He added, though, that “the NoSQL learning curve isn’t too steep because using MongoDB – a document database – you can easily create database models, queries, etc.”

Marko said his prior experience with SQL databases and a fundamental knowledge of database design gained in his database management course in Poole College and prior internships “helped me better understand NoSQL.” That, coupled with experience working in groups as part of the college’s IT concentration “was essential to our success in this challenge,” he said.

“Poole definitely provided me with motivation to keep pushing forward,” Ryan said, adding “a BIG thank you to Sherry Fowler (Poole College lecturer) for supporting our group throughout the semester.” Marko also commended Ryan for the “plethora of tools” that he brought to the project “gathered throughout his web development career.”

Among those were GitHub, a repository for collaboration; Balsamiq and other software tools for wireframing, DigitalOcean for hosting, LoadImpact for load testing and PHPStorm from JetBrains as their code editor.

Fowler commended the students for their perseverance in the project. “Their work is quite amazing, especially considering that they completed it in one semester while still maintaining their academic coursework,” she said.

The students each won an iPad Air and an opportunity to interview with Credit Suisse. They already had jobs lined up prior to their Credit Suisse interviews, though. Marko, who graduated in May 2015, is working as an analyst with Congizant; Ryan is graduating in fall 2015 and is a web developer with The WP Valet.