Developer Spotlight: João Pedro Sodré, University College London

João Pedro Sodré started coding by learning C# as a teenager interested in video game development. His interests diverged a bit from tech shortly after, but he never stopped programming to some capacity. João obtained a (Hons) BSc Philosophy, Politics & Economics degree from King's College London, with his dissertation relying heavily on data analysis done mostly in Python. Shortly after graduating, João interned as an economic research analyst at BTG Pactual Asset Management. During his time at BTG Pactual, João worked with NLP models, web scraping and econometric analysis, mostly in R and Python. Having greatly enjoyed doing many of these data science projects, João decided to learn more computer science by enrolling in the Master's Degree he is currently doing at University College London.

The project João is currently working on, together with other MSc students, is a contract management tool for UCL's IXN team. UCL IXN (Industry Exchange Network) is the section of UCL's Computer Science department that manages all of the department's projects with industry partners. For each of these projects, the involved parties need to sign a variety of legally binding documents setting out each party's obligations and governing the relationships between them. Every year the UCL CS department can have upwards of 500 (or more) projects with industry, and each of these projects will have individual contracts. These projects also can involve multiple students and faculty, with each individual involved in the project signing a separate contract.

João is developing a web app and supporting back end for the IXN admin team to oversee the whole contract signing process, from creation to signing to archiving, replacing all previous workflows, which were inefficient from both financial and technical standpoints. Using Docusign Templates, the eSignature REST API and Connect service, the team is able to issue standard contracts from prebuilt templates and track each contract's signature status easily from the app. The tech stack for the app is React, Redux, and Material UI for front end; Node.js, Express, and PostgreSQL for back end. In this project, João has been the dev responsible for integrating the app with Docusign APIs and services.

João’s hobbies are pretty varied. While not working or studying, he’s an avid boulderer and runner. João also has great interest in music, and regularly gets together with his friends to play in makeshift garage bands. People can reach João on LinkedIn.