Introduction

Over the past 4 months, from May to August 2021, I have completed by third Bachelor of Computing co-op work term at Kenna. In this report, I will talk about Kenna itself, my goals for the term, as well as detail the various projects I was involved in over the summer.

About Kenna

Kenna describes itself as a “marketing solutions provider”. They were founded in 1985 as AppliCan Marketing. Essentially, Kenna provides marketing services to its clients through several venues. One of these venues are web applications that clients can use to communicate with and better reach their customer base.

According to LinkedIn, Kenna has 177 employees, including both full-time employees as well as other co-op students. They are based in Mississauga, Ontario.

Kenna’s biggest client is BASF Canada, the Canadian branch of German chemical company BASF. One of the products that BASF Canada provides are herbicides, pesticides, insecticides and other farming-related chemicals, as well as the various crops to apply them to.

To assist them with the sale of these products, Kenna develops a wide array of different web applications that facilitate this process, from retailers ordering different SKUs of products from BASF, to those retailers then selling those products to individual farmers. This also includes as other related services, like managing product quality assurance and claims related to defective products, as well as rebate rewards given when retailers meet certain sales requirements.

To develop these web applications, Kenna uses a variety of different technologies. Historically, their applications were developed using a Lotus/IBM/HCL Domino web server, in combination with a Microsoft SQL Server database. However, the company is now in transition to a more modern tech stack that uses Facebook’s React library, as well as Node.js.

Goals

Over the past term, I set the following goals for myself:

  • Become better at communicating with others over written channels.
  • Get better at keeping others I am working with updated on the status of tasks I am working on.
  • Improve how organized I am with my work, specifically in recording what I have done to complete specific tasks.

As this is my third term at Kenna, I have become relatively proficient at the technical aspects of my job. As such, in this semester, I wanted to try and focus more on my “soft skills”, such as communication, organization, etc. Improving these skills can be very beneficial, as they will help me succeed in the future, regardless of what I may end up doing in future work. Every job requires some level of communication and organization skills, so improving on these skills is guaranteed to benefit me in job opportunities to come.

Over the course of the past 4 months, I believe I have made significant improvements in my ability to communicate effectively with others over written channels. With experience, I have learned that it is very important to be very explicit in your communications in this way, to avoid potential misunderstandings. Much of the nonverbal communication that can help you to communicate the meaning of your words when working face-to-face is lost over written communication methods, so it’s important to be extra careful and clearly explain what you are trying to say when writing. Due to this increase in understanding, I believe I have successfully completed this goal.

I also believe I have made great improvements when it comes to informing others on the status of whatever it is I am working on. During this work term, if I was ever in a situation in which I noticed I hadn’t communicated with my supervisor in several days, I would reach out to them, to ensure that they were aware of what I was working on at any particular point in time. Now that I have built this habit, I believe it will help me greatly in future roles, especially if they are remote.

Out of all the goals I made for this work term, I believe I have made the greatest strides in improving the organization of my work. At the start of the term, I stated that I wanted to start recording any changes I made to code at the task level, as opposed to recording what I did day-to-day. Over the course of my work term at Kenna, I have done exactly that. This change has made significant improvements in my overall organization. Issues that I experienced in previous terms relating to changes not being correctly associated with specific tasks have all but been eliminated. I am very satisfied with the results of this change, and I will continue to organize myself in this way in the future.

I believe that this work term has been very successful for me with regards to accomplishing my goals. In comparison to previous terms, I have made greater progress on my goals. This has resulted in a significant increase in the quality of my work. I am very satisfied with the decisions I made as to what goals to pick for this work term.

Job Description

My job title at Kenna was “Web Application Developer”. As this title implies, I spent the majority of my time at Kenna this term building web applications.

A major difference between this term and my previous terms at Kenna was what I worked with, specifically. In previous terms I spent much of my time on Kenna’s legacy Domino tech stack, building web applications using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this term, while I still spent a large amount of time working in the Domino stack, I also spent a significant amount of time building applications in React, with a Node.js back-end. Going into this term, I had very little experience working with either of these technologies. Through working with React and Node in my day-to-day tasks, I was able to obtain a strong familiarity with them both. These experiences will be very helpful in any future positions I pursue, as React and Node are popular choices for developing modern web applications.

Some of the tasks I worked on during this term at Kenna include:

  • Grower Connect - Pre-Call Plan Updates (May - June 2021)
    • Updated existing form used to help grower representatives plan upcoming calls with growers.
    • Modified and created new HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SQL code to accommodate updates.
  • Grower Connect - Grower List Filter Updates (May - August 2021)
    • Updated list of growers that a grower representative can interact with, modifying filters to work with data from upcoming 2022 season.
    • Modified back-end code to remove hard-coded season number references, so that many year-to-year updates of filters occur automatically.
  • Grower Connect - Grower Dashboard Tile Updates (June - August 2021)
    • Updated functionality where grower representatives can view growers that have potential opportunities, opportunities are organized into tiles.
    • Modified existing front-end code to work with the re-implementation of the backend for this functionality.
  • AgConnect - Feedback Forms Rebuild (June - August 2021)
    • Re-built the existing application for managers submitting feedback about representatives
    • Application was built from scratch, completely independent of the original codebase
    • Utilized React and Node to build a modern, componentized web application that is scalable for future updates.

Conclusion

The past 4 months I’ve spent at Kenna have been incredibly fulfilling. I am very pleased with the experiences I have gained at Kenna, both during this term as well as in in my previous terms. The skills I have developed whilst working at Kenna will benefit me for years to come, as I continue in my career. I would not hesitate in the future to recommend Kenna to other co-op students who are looking for an experience that will challenge them, and help them improve as a developer.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of my co-workers at Kenna, especially my supervisor for this term, Anusha Vairamani. They have helped made this past term at Kenna a very valuable experience for me.

I would also like to thank the individuals that manage the Bachelor of Computing co-op program at the University of Guelph, for helping to put me in a position where I was able to apply for my job at Kenna in the first place.