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Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations

Summer Quarter

August 21, 2020

DB Nguyen

"Disney Software Engineering Internship"

(The Walt Disney Company)

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Arnie Lund

Abstract

The Walt Disney Company's Direct-to-Consumer & International (DTCI) segment is responsible for Disney's digital media and streaming services. The company's ownership of a robust set of subsidiaries makes efficient content management a critical component of the company's success. The Content Management Systems (CMS) team, on which I interned, is responsible for managing content for business units across DTCI, helping to ensure the quality and availability of consumer-facing media.

The project focused on one such CMS, GoPublish, which supports ABC News, ESPN, and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. Maintaining 24/7 support for GoPublish means that engineers responsible for the CMS participate in an on-call rotation, dealing with any critical issue reports; should an issue arise, the engineer on-call triages the issue by determining affected environments and identifying the root cause. However, instance details about components of the CMS are scattered throughout Disney's documentation, where they were too seldom updated; as a result, response time to critical incident reports is slowed by the difficulty of finding necessary information.

The project I worked on during my internship aimed to solve issues engineers have while on-call by creating a single web application to display a dashboard of business units and their respective instance details. The aim of my project was not only to condense this information into a single dashboard, but to populate the data dynamically using each service's REST APIs. It was, at its core, a full-stack project that required the entire software development lifecycle, including requirement-gathering, design, implementation, and testing.

By the end of my internship, I had designed and developed a minimum viable product for the dashboard that provides up-to- date instance details for DTCI's business units. Although the dashboard is awaiting deployment production, it will improve engineering response time to critical issues within the GoPublish CMS. The current state of the dashboard only supports GoPublish, but both engineers and leadership across the DTCI segment have begun to express interest in expanding the dashboard to use in their systems and environments.

Updated August 20, 2020, 1:06