Jul 8, 2021
Summer Internship Adventures: A bit about me and my project.
Hello Everyone 😁
My name is Sahil, and I am a summer intern on the Babylon.js team! In this post, I will be introducing myself, and then I will be giving a little sneak peek into what I have been doing during the internship.
Who am I?
Well, I am a 21-year-old from Toronto, Ontario (Canada). I was born in India but moved here when I was three years old.
I found my passion for programming at a very young age, and I just knew I had to pursue this as a career. I can still remember making a simple console calculator as my first project and how happy I was when it worked.
A few years later, I got super interested in cybersecurity due to many CTF websites introduced to me at a young age. It was like a bunch of puzzles that unraveled every challenge I completed. I struggled a lot, but every challenge made me better!
A few years after that, I was super interested in game development and used the unity editor to make some games with a few friends back in high school. Of course, none of us had experience making 3D models, so the games had less-than-ideal model quality. Thankfully the unity asset store existed! Unfortunately for us, we lost the code due to not using GitHub. I sure learned to use Git for everything after that.
Then came time to choose a University! I chose the University of Ottawa because it was in a new city, it allowed me to meet a wide variety of people, it wasn’t going to bust the bank, and it had a great co-op program. It honestly feels like just yesterday that I was intimidated by the large classrooms, writing code on glass windows with markers, and trying to help out my friends during late-night study sessions. The experiences of my first year were quite interesting.
But, it turns out I am already entering my final term in my degree in Software Engineering this Fall.
My program structure is a bit strange compared to many other programs, and we have to do four years plus one trimester before we finish. The aforementioned is because we have five co-ops built into the program from the start, five opportunities I had to gain experience in the industry!
It has been a busy few years, and I have learned a lot! My first internship was with the government. Then I joined Microsoft through the Garage internship program for my second internship, where I built a VS code extension to help bootstrap the web development process.
A few internships at Microsoft later, and I am now interning on the Babylon.js team!
What do I do in my past time?
When I am not programming, I usually watch movies, watch anime, read manga, or play video games!
When I was growing up, I played many Pokemon games, many Jak & Daxter games, many Final Fantasy games, most Kingdom Hearts games, most Ratchet and Clank games, and many Legend of Zelda games. So, of course, all of these series are very close to my heart. Seriously, I could talk about these series and many others for a long time.
Recently I have been playing Scarlet Nexus and Genshin Impact a lot! Maybe a bit too much?
What else is there to know about me?
I enjoy yummy food a lot. I have been gathering recommendations over the years for places to go to when I visit. I enjoy sushi, specifically, a lot! I may spend a bit too much on sushi. I am scared to find out how much I’ve spent on sushi over the years.
I have also only visited two countries other than the one I live in (Canada) and the one I was born in (India). That being the United States (New York City, Seattle, Orlando), and Cuba. Each city and place had their own unique experiences, and I want to visit many more countries in the future!
What have I been doing in my internship?
You may have been slightly spoiled regarding what I am working on if you have seen my pull requests or my first forum post. To reiterate, I am currently working on a performance visualization tool for Babylon.js. At the time, we can only see snapshots in time of the performance statistics within the inspector.
This method makes it challenging to see notable trends or to see how the statistics are related. After I complete my feature, some of the performance statistics you can see in the inspector will also be available in a graphical format. The graph will stream the data in real-time, and the data streams will be togglable. The color of the lines will also be customizable by the user.
Have you had any challenges so far?
The biggest challenge I have faced so far is that I cannot take on any external dependencies due to maintenance and extensibility reasons. I was expecting to use a charting library, but software development plans change all the time.
There are related challenges such as zooming into the data, panning the data, showing the values of the points when hovering over the data, and making the chart performant enough to handle real-time data.
How are you progressing?
To make the graph performant, I decided to use the canvas API over SVGs. I read many results with real-time graphing, showing that SVGs scale poorly with the number of data points. The canvas API is a bit tougher to work with, as all the data points need to become pixels. Thankfully I remembered a handy trick, min-max normalization. The equation rescales all values in an array x to the range of [0, 1].
If we multiply these normalized values by the available drawing space in the x-axis and separately by the drawing area in the y-axis, we get our pixel coordinates. Using some methods in the canvas API combined with translating the data points into pixels allowed me to have lines drawn on the screen in real time.
The next goal was to handle zooming into the data. I found out that zooming is just expanding or reducing the number of items on the screen, which helped solve the zooming problem. We found that having the data span the entire canvas makes data look more chaotic when zooming in. So, we decided to make the data cover 80% of the canvas when the canvas is streaming data in real-time. I found that panning is just changing the offset of the viewport, so I am currently solving that problem.
The panning does not reduce the size of the play head at the moment. However, it will become dynamic later on.
Concluding thoughts
There is a lot left to do still, but I am enjoying every moment of it. The Babylon team is fantastic and has been mentoring me a lot! I hope everyone reading this has learned a little about myself and my project. I am excited to see everyone enjoy this feature in the future.
Until next time!
Sahil Tara — Babylon.js team
