Taco Bell

It is an ongoing joke for my older sis to go around telling everybody that I used to work at Taco Bell. Of course, they think "what's the big deal?" and assume I was a fry cook or something. Without skipping a beat, I always laugh, roll my eyes, and clarify that I was an intern at Taco Bell HQ as a software engineer. I've practiced the script about a hundred times now.

Anyway, I absolutely loved my time at Taco Bell! The people were amazing, the office was stunning, and the snacks were free and plentiful. I also had the pleasure of being able to experience the Taco Bell test kitchen where all the new and experimental food items are created and reviewed before being released across the world or stuffed in a drawer somewhere never again to see the light of day. The company flies in chefs from all over the world to collaborate on recipes that could potentially be eaten by millions, and let me tell you what I got to try was bomb. The test kitchen has the same specialized cooking tech as every Taco Bell location so the chefs have to get a little creative with the process. Here's a pro tip: the Taco Bell off of Barranca Parkway in Irvine, CA is the first location to receive the newest stuff to test the public market ;)

It was also incredible seeing how much cutting edge tech Taco Bell utilized to ensure high availability across all platforms. I was able to see firsthand the tech that runs payment, order processing, restaurant kiosks, and more! My big project was using the Serverless Framework, Typescript, and Node to build a microservice hosted on AWS Lambda. It served as an intermediary cache between the old Product Content Management (PCM) system on SAP Hybris and the new PCM built in house by Yum! corporate. By extracting the necessary data for the ordering system from Hybris, my microservice was able to process it and make it available internally on an AWS S3 bucket and act as a network cache. It would then periodically update the data and served over 30k daily requests. It decreased the latency of backend API calls by up to 250% which significantly improved the end user experience when placing orders. As a result, it was subsequently integrated into the production stack and to my knowledge is still in use today.

Another project I worked on was providing a proof of concept prototype version of the Taco Bell website and ordering pipeline using the new PCM I mentioned earlier, demonstrating to the CEO, CTO, and other C-suite executives that the in house PCM could be used effectively and reliably. I built a new order flow using NextJS, React, Typescript, and Contentful as a Content Management System (CMS) and was able to present a live, working demo at the quarterly technical meeting. I was also the only intern in Taco Bell history to complete 2 projects in one internship, let alone a separate front end and backend project. I learned a lot and many of the skills I picked up working on my projects and learning from my amazing mentor Gilbert I now use in what I work on today.

And yes, I still regularly eat Taco Bell!