ISS Supply Optimization
Supply-chain optimization, forecasting, and analytics for the International Space Station.
As team leader on a student-developed project for a spaceflight company, I managed the planning, design, and delivery of a full-stack web application created to analyze and optimize the shipment of critical supplies to the International Space Station. Over the course of the project, I was responsible for implementing the backend and frontend while coordinating with the students responsible for analysis and integrating their solutions into the server architecture. This project culminated in a presentation to the client and key members of the NASA data team.
The server application was built using Django, a Python web application framework, as its core backbone. Core analysis functions were integrated into controllers to produce analyses that were passed to Plotly to generate visualizations. Key data and visualizations were then rendered and returned to the client. The frontend was created using HTMX to keep things as simple as possible. I made the decision to avoid a traditional frontend framework so our small team could focus on keeping the application state on the server rather than trying to recreate and manage the state in two places.
This was a challenging and rewarding project that not only helped me expand my technical skills but added to my experience supervising teams. While the technical aspects of the project were challenging, the hardest part of this project was effectively managing a team of developers with different skills and backgrounds to deliver an application that didn't just answer the client's core questions but looked good doing it.