Post by Anthony Lei

For the past few weeks, I have been working with my team on our capstone project, a Digital SCADA simulation system. The goal of this project is to simulate how a SCADA system can monitor important grid-related values and respond when those values move outside expected operating ranges. My main focus has been backend development, specifically threshold checking and alarm functionality. This includes helping the system detect when values such as frequency or voltage move outside expected ranges and creating alarms when certain conditions need attention. During this period, I completed one pull request and currently have another pull request in review. My work included helping with threshold-checking behavior, alarm creation logic, and decisions about how the backend should respond when certain data is missing or incomplete. Working through these tasks has helped me better understand backend development, GitHub workflows, pull request reviews, and how small backend logic changes can support larger system behavior. One challenge I experienced and learned from was deciding how to handle missing data in the threshold-checking logic. Our group decided that the system would work best if it continued running while skipping only the checks that were missing the required data, instead of throwing an error or using default values. This experience taught me the importance of carefully considering how to handle improper or missing data in a backend system because it could lead to bigger issues later, such as crashes or unreliable results. Since the backend is still in progress, I do not currently have visuals or screenshots to share. Overall, this project has helped me improve both my technical skills and my understanding of how to better plan and design stronger backend systems. #CapstoneProject #SCADA #BackendDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #GitHub #CSB440