OctoInterns!
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

We're stoked to have four interns with us this summer! Eric Lam writes about their role in our mission to open up access to part data.

octointerns

Katrine, Eric, He and Peitong.

And once again, interns inhabit the office. Time to get out the whips!...

We interns actually play a big role in Octopart. We take a big part in data collection. We need data on millions upon millions of parts. Sometimes we can get a feed from manufacturers or distributors, but other times it isn't that easy.

So what do we do instead? In some instances, we can gather a lot of data from a part number itself and make rules recognizing patterns in the mpn. Take a part number such as "CRCW0402100RFKED". We would find the datasheet and see that the manufacturer part number can be broken into segments such as "CRCW", "0402" and "100R". From this information, we know it is a chip resistor with size code "0402" with resistance of 100 Ohms. With this information, we can cover a large amount of parts with a single rule.

Even that's not enough. Whether it be difficult to find rules for the part numbers or that datasheets don't give certain information, that's when we look at manufacturers' websites and write crawlers to take in much needed data about individual parts.

There are other things that we do as well. Some of us do front-end work, making style changes to some of our pages or updating our billing system (we don't want that breaking!).

The interns are being put to good use and are having a blast during it. We are glad to be onboard with Octopart!

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