My Princetern­ship was hosted by Joe Ross ‘97, Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer and co-founder of Red­Vi­sion.  Red­Vi­sion pro­vides “Real Prop­erty Research solu­tions”, includ­ing title searches.  This infor­ma­tion is needed when­ever prop­er­ties are sold.  Banks need to know the details of any mort­gage on the prop­erty, as well as other finan­cial doc­u­ments (home equity loans, car loans gone awry, etc.) that are tied to the prop­erty.  These doc­u­ments are stored in fil­ing cab­i­nets scat­tered in munic­i­pal­i­ties across the coun­try, mak­ing the search process tedious and time-consuming.  That’s where Red­Vi­sion comes in.  They have been work­ing for years to make these doc­u­ments avail­able online in a search­able format.

I spent most of my day with Antony Karou­nis (Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor, Plant Data Tech­nolo­gies).  He intro­duced me to every­one in the soft­ware engi­neer­ing depart­ment before explain­ing the prob­lem in the title search mar­ket that Red­Vi­sion aims to solve.  He also explained agile soft­ware devel­op­ment.  On a basic level, agile con­sists of 2–4 week “sprints” where devel­op­ers try to accom­plish assigned tasks.  These tasks are cho­sen in a pre-sprint meet­ing from a back­log of all tasks that the group plans to address even­tu­ally.  The group recon­venes post-sprint to decide if the sprint was a suc­cess or a fail­ure, and to iden­tify areas for improvement.

Before lunch, I had the chance to observe one of the pre-sprint meet­ings.  Much of it was over my head, as I had only a basic under­stand­ing of the company–not an in-depth under­stand­ing of their prod­ucts, the bugs therein, and the acronyms they used on a daily basis.  That being said, it was cer­tainly worth­while to see the approach Mr. Karou­nis used to coor­di­nate the group.  I’ve only worked on small projects with at most a cou­ple of friends, so I’d never really thought about the pro­ce­dures required to coor­di­nate a larger group on a project that has been ongo­ing for years.

Bren­dan and Joe Ross

Mr. Karou­nis treated me to lunch at an Indian buf­fet with about 8 other employ­ees (includ­ing most of the devel­op­ers).  I exchanged sto­ries about Prince­ton with two of the employ­ees who had grad­u­ated just last year.  Our con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ued upon return­ing to the office, where they told me about their roles in the com­pany, why they’d cho­sen to work there, and how they had been very sur­prised to see each other when they both started work at Red­Vi­sion on the same day.  They also gave me some school-based advice, such as how they’d cho­sen their majors (both com­puter sci­ence) and which courses they recommended.

Next, I met with two employ­ees who had been at Red­Vi­sion for a few years.  We talked mostly about what they liked and dis­liked about the pro­gram­ming indus­try in gen­eral.  The group that had met in the morn­ing then reassem­bled to reflect on the sprint that had just ended.  This was sim­i­lar to the morn­ing ses­sion for me: it was very tech­ni­cal, but pro­vided insight into the agile devel­op­ment process.

Finally, I met with Mr. Ross to dis­cuss RedVision’s his­tory and his career path.  We also chat­ted about Prince­ton, and how much it had changed since his grad­u­a­tion.  After snap­ping a few pho­tos for the blog, Mr. Karou­nis gave me a ride to the bus stop, where I began the lengthy com­mute from Par­sip­pany to Prince­ton, arriv­ing just in time to catch din­ner with two min­utes to spare.