Symcor
In the summer of 2024, I had the honor of working alongside many talented and welcoming people at Symcor, a prominent data processing company working with some of the largest banks in Canada.
Symcor is a very diverse and multifaceted company with one shared goal: to fuel business transformation through data. In the financial industry, it aims to process banking data, securely store/deliver data, and detect fraud. Having worked in the Payment Processing Services (PPS) team for the last 4 months, I've been greatly enjoying both Symcor's work ethic and dynamic people-first culture.
As a software developer in PPS, I spearheaded the development and maintenance of an internal archive tool that stored cheque and financial report data for our client banks. This web app saw a plethora of changes since its inception, so regression testing was also frequently performed before changes were shipped to QA.
I was also responsible for other smaller, investigative tasks such as GitLab migrations for old projects, pipeline setup/testing, and Proof-of-Concepts (POCs) for new ideas we wanted to bring into reality.
One of the main projects I worked on is called Federated Object Archive (FOA) Portal — a web portal that stores over 7 years of cheque and financial report data for our major clients. Internal Symcor employees would use FOA Portal to retrieve groups of financial data at a time whenever requested by clients. As a part of efforts to modernize Symcor tools, Portal brought significant improvements over our previous solutions in archive data retrieval — both in UI and in ease of use.
On the technical side, FOA Portal is a Tomcat project with a frontend built on Backbone.js and a backend built on Java Spring. The Spring backend acts as a wrapper around the FOA core API, which is where the meat and potatoes of FOA lives. I've worked on both ends of Portal thus far and have been a key contributor to its successful adoption.
A notable feature recently added to Portal is the ability to search for report data using custom fields tailored to the specific report being queried. This allowed users to narrow down search results BEFORE receiving their data instead of after, significantly improving query times. Moreover, data validation was added for each custom field, giving users clarity and an immediate response from any unintended form error.
During my phenomenal experience at Symcor, I worked with the following frameworks and tools:
