OJT Training Experience- BUCENG, Laurence Lemuel G. Ayo BSIT 4B

April 3, 2026 Day 29, a Holy Week for Christians and our 3rd day of our Passover      Today is the start of Holy Week, and with it came the collective exhale of a team that has been running on deadlines and caffeine and sheer determination for weeks. We have not yet deployed the system to Vercel, that is still on the list but we made a conscious decision to let that wait. The deployment will happen. The system is ready enough. But our families have been waiting longer.      There is something grounding about Holy Week that I think a lot of people feel regardless of where they are in life. The Christian country slows down, everything urgent suddenly feels like it can wait a few days, and you remember that the people around you matter more than any project milestone. I needed that reminder today. We all did.      The past weeks have been genuinely intense. From finalizing designs to coding sprints to branch merges to bug fixes to a presentation...

April 2, 2026 We Presented to the Dean      Today we had our online presentation of the DMAS to the College of Engineering Dean and her secretary. And I want to be honest about how that felt going in, and it was nerve-wracking. The Dean is not just any audience. She is the person whose approval carries weight, whose feedback shapes whether this system actually gets adopted and used by real people in a real office. That is not the same pressure as presenting to a classroom.      We walked through the system from start to finish. The document submission flow, the monitoring features, the notifications, the administrative controls, all of it. We explained our design decisions, demonstrated how each role in the system interacts with it, and answered the questions that came up along the way. There were moments where I was watching the screen and genuinely hoping nothing would break mid-demo, which is a very specific kind of anxiety that I think every developer u...

March 31, 2026 Tuesday the Last Preparations and Samurai      The final day of preparation before our online presentation with the Dean. Today was less about finding new problems and more about making sure everything we already knew about was resolved, documented, and ready. We went through the system one more time as a team as each of us navigate through the parts we built, demonstrating flows to each other, catching anything that still felt off.      There is something valuable about testing your own system with fresh eyes on the day before you present it. You stop seeing it as the developer who built it and start seeing it the way a user would experience it for the first time. That shift in perspective revealed a few small things we adjusted nothing major, just a few details that would have been noticeable to someone encountering the system without context.      We also spent time preparing how we were going to walk the Dean and her secret...

March 30, 2026 Before Presentation      There is a particular kind of focused energy that comes with knowing a deadline is no longer next week or sometime soon but is literally two days away. Today had that energy all over it. We spent the day doing final bug fixes on the DMAS, going through every feature, every flow, every edge case we could think of, and making sure that when we sat in front of the College of Engineering Dean on Wednesday, the system would behave exactly the way it was supposed to.      Bug fixing at this stage is different from bug fixing in the middle of development. Earlier on, you find a problem and you have room to rethink your approach. This close to a presentation, you fix it and you move forward. There is no time for elegant rewrites. You find the issue, you address it cleanly, and you test it again. That was the rhythm of today which we find, fix, test, repeat.      The system has come a long way from the first lin...

March 27, 2026 Day 25, Eyes on the Presentation      Wrapping up the week on a Friday that felt quieter than the days before it. The email notification system is largely in place, the security concerns we identified earlier in the week have been addressed, and the system as a whole is in a meaningfully better state than it was on Monday morning. That is the measure of a good week.      Today was less about new development and more about consolidation, reviewing what we had built this week, making notes of anything that still needed attention before the virtual presentation, and mentally preparing for the final push that the coming week would demand. The presentation with the Dean is approaching fast and we want to walk into it with a system that is not just functional but genuinely polished.      I find myself thinking more and more about the bigger picture lately. The system is coming together. The team is working well. But underneath all of...

March 26, 2026 Thursday while Polishing and Testing Flows      Most of the day was spent testing. Once the email notification logic was in place and the security measures were implemented, we needed to actually run through every scenario we could think of and make sure everything behaved correctly end to end. That meant simulating document submissions, approvals, and returns, and watching whether the right emails fired at the right moments with the right content.      Some tests passed cleanly. Others revealed small issues. One was notification firing twice in certain conditions, a subject line that was pulling the wrong value, a case where the recipient was not being resolved correctly. Each one got logged, addressed, and tested again. It is the kind of work that is invisible once it is done but would be very visible if it were left broken during a live presentation.      The presentation is two weeks away and that proximity is sharpening ev...

March 25, 2026 Security Measures and Permissions      Today was almost entirely focused on the security side of the notification system. Once you start sending automated emails from a web application, you open a surface area that needs to be protected such as things like making sure API credentials are stored properly, that the email triggers cannot be manipulated by unauthorized actions, and that the system behaves predictably even when someone tries to interact with it in ways it was not designed for.      We went through our implementation and identified a few areas that needed tightening. Nothing alarming, but the kind of things you catch when you are looking specifically for vulnerabilities rather than just checking if the feature works. There is a difference between a feature that functions and a feature that functions securely, and we wanted to make sure we were building the latter.      I also spent some time today thinking about ...

March 24, 2026 Getting Into the Email Notification Logic      We started getting into the actual implementation today. The email notification feature is more layered than it appears on the surface. It is not just about sending an email, but it is about making sure the right email goes to the right person at the right time, that the content of the email is clear and useful, and that the whole thing is secure enough that it cannot be easily exploited or abused.      We spent a good part of the day working through the triggering logic and figuring out which system events should fire a notification and how those triggers connect to the email service we were integrating with. We use "Brevo" and there, a few moments where the logic got tangled and we had to step back and rethink the flow, but that is normal at this stage. You write something, you trace it through, you find the gap, and you fix it.      The security side of it is something we are be...

March 23, 2026 A New Week      Day 21, an OJT Student on a Monday always has that feeling of resetting the counter. Last week we had the database tables taking shape in Supabase and the frontend finally merged into one coherent codebase. This week the goal shifted toward something more specific — the email notification system. It is one of those features that sounds simple from the outside but requires a surprising amount of thought to implement properly, especially when security is part of the equation.      We started today by mapping out what the notification system needed to do. Every time a document moves through the system submitted, received, approved, archived those the relevant people need to know about it. That means emails have to be triggered at the right moments, sent to the right people, and structured in a way that is actually useful rather than just noise in someone's inbox. Getting that logic right before writing a single line of the imple...