Employee Spotlight: Yating Chen, Software Engineer

In our mission to help clients understand what is happening on and to the Earth, we’ve created a culture that pushes us forward to deliver exceptional results. Orbital Insight created its Employee spotlight to illustrate the culture and people needed to support our mission.

In this month’s Employee Spotlight, we interview Yating Chen, a software engineer, one of the many exceptional team members at Orbital Insight that is changing how businesses, governments, and NGO’s understand the world.

Q: Middleware is a critical component in enterprise software. How does this help customers on a daily basis?

A: The scope of middleware highly depends on different business logic and system architecture. In our case, the middleware team is not at the lower bottom level as in other companies. It is responsible for integrating data pipelines and exposing APIs to front-end UI as well as API users. Through the APIs, our customers can have direct access (or indirect access by navigating through the UI) to the workflow of project creation. Basic creation workflow includes adding geolocation areas of interest, choosing the time range he or she wants to observe, and selecting algorithms he or she wants to run on that project. Our exposed APIs allow users to have specific control over each step of the workflow. At the end of each project run, customers can retrieve results from APIs or view the visualization through the UI. As for the pipeline part, our data pipeline is the magical behind-the-scenes workflow that transforms raw imagery and IoT data into valuable analytics for our clients. The smooth execution of pipeline ensures we can deliver high-quality data on time to our customers.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

A: I am working on implementing asynchronous results download workflow. We used to have a general results export format for all algorithms, but since different algorithms have different underlying measurements format, we decided to make the results downloader algorithm-specific and try to deliver as much valuable information associated with each measurement as possible to our customers. The process of gathering a big volume of measurements data from a couple of services and merging them together accurately is the challenging part of this feature implementation.

Q: What are your passions outside of Orbital Insight?

A: Besides coding, I like urban dance. I am a huge fan of Millennium studio. The studio has many talented choreographers and Kaycee Rice is my favorite dancer!