um, I guess I'll start kind of in high school ish. Um, I was really into video games, and, um, at one point, I wanted to learn how to make my own video games, and that kind of got me into a little bit of coding. Um, nothing too advanced. Um, but that gave me the interest. Um, and then I eventually joined Kind of the, um, a specialized high school, I guess where they actually had a proper, like, CS curriculum. Um, so with that, I was really already ready to kind of jump into computer science. Um, then once I got to college, um, I went to Georgia Tech, and that was a very CS focus to school. Eso There was a lot of different resource is lots of different classes to try out, um, and then from there, obviously, um, the career part kind of really started. Um, and I guess the biggest factors. Well, first off, when I first tried getting an internship as a freshman, I wasn't able to land anything, um, and that, I think, helped shape my experience quite a bit because at the time it seemed like everyone was getting an internship even as early as freshmen. But that was kind of like the first thing that told me like Hey, like, you know, it's OK. Not everyone does an internship right off the bat on. Then the second year I did land an internship, um, at a company called Ultimate Software. But then I actually had a couple of friends who were working on a start up at the time, and they had invited me to actually stay for the summer and work with them for the start up. Obviously, I would make less, but I could potentially learn more. So that was the other big experience where I basically turned on my internship on, instead, started, decided to work on this start up, and that was probably the best experience I could have gotten for helping my career. Hey, because it helped me expand outside of just Tech instead of just coding at the work with sales, marketing, product design, user study, stuff like that. Um, and once I came out of it, I had learned so many tools that I wouldn't learn in school. Nor do I actually learned in my current job right now, Um, that just kind of helped me solidify the idea that, like, you know, I can make whatever I choose to put my mind to. Obviously, it's harder than just doing that on. And then after that, I applied for an internship. Google had applied before as well. Um, but this time actually got it. And then from there I converted to full time. And now here I am.

So the good thing about Google and I think a lot of other tech companies is that they're kind of flexible on your work hours, you don't necessarily have to do eight hours every day. Um, they do expect 40 hour weeks, but I can kind of choose when I work and when I don't work. Um so for my own personal, um, style of work, I might do, like, six hours, one day, maybe eight hours, another and then maybe even for, like, 9 10 hours on another day. So that really depends on then for the specific responsibility. So, as a software engineer, obviously I'm going to be touching code, and I'm gonna be coding for most of my work. Um, but even before actually get decoding a lot of there's a lot of, um, design reviews. A lot of like a process to figure out what I'll be coding, especially for larger projects, projects that have to deal with infrastructure changes or, um, basically, anything that's gonna be hitting our production and it's gonna have an impact. You kind of have to go through a review, make sure everyone's on board, and you have all of the pieces ready to go so that you can properly test it. You can know when stuff is breaking by having monitoring proper logging, stuff like that. Um so typically, it's just designing and coding kind of as a A mix is kind of the responsibilities.

the language and probably used the most often a C plus. Plus, I use python decent bit for some of our testing infrastructure. Um, but I would say, Ah, in general, um, at most places that specifically Google c++, python, java, go JavaScript. Those were kind of the the biggest languages we used in terms of a lot of, um, programs or frameworks models. A lot of the internal tools, they're expensive. They're not necessarily, like, accessible by the outside public. As often we have our own version control system. But, you know, learning a version control system is important. Um, our own testing infrastructure, the way we do deployment. It's kind of a black box to most engineers because they don't need to worry about it. Um, so those besides those internal tools, um, algorithms, um, it really depends on kind of like what team? You're on for me. There's not a algorithm. I work on ads. Um, so a lot of the ads ecosystem has a lot of moving pieces. Um, so the algorithm is actually just a bunch of different servers. Kind of talking to each other. Um, and information changes as it goes. Um, but I think just knowing your basics is obviously a very good start. Basic data structures, basic algorithms Just so that your in the mind set of how to solve problems.so I mean, I personally learned Java first, and I think that's Ah, Java Python C plus plus are generally good languages. I think to start off because you start learning object or into programming. Um, which some people can argue is not the best for you to learn. Some people argue that it is. I personally just found it helpful because, um, it's still the standard, even though there's a lot of other functional programming languages that are becoming more popular. Um, since most of the code you're going to deal with, especially if you're just working in the industry within the next 24 years, um, it's still gonna be that code. Um, that being said, definitely certainly, which is air better for certain rules and jobs. Um, so if you want to get into data engineering or machine learning or Ai Python is one of the best things still earn just because of the libraries, it has same thing with go go is pretty decent, A swell if you're going into Web development than obviously JavaScript. There's also typescript, which is kind of up and coming, Um, and then for everything else, basically like anything, really, the servers back in C plus plus drama, those air kind of the categories that they sit in at the moment.