Summer Time!

It's been almost half a year since I have updated this blog and too many things have happened since! To give you all a quick recap of my life, I completed 3 courses, Operating Systems (CPSC 313), Advanced Database (CPSC 404) and a EOSC elective course this past Spring term. Taking another OS course after the one I took in Birmingham University (where I went on exchange) was quite interesting. While the OS in Birmingham went through different subjects at extreme speed, the OS course at UBC went through much fewer topics but in much great depth. It was quite fun to code in C again. On top of that, when I took CPSC 213 which was the pre-req for CPSC 313, that the first time I've ever touched C in my life and I found the assignments in CPSC 213 to be quite difficult. 3 years later, with 20 months of industry experience through internships and a few more academic terms, I found the C assignments to be a complete breeze in CPSC 313. This was an example to not be discouraged when courses early in your major don't exactly go your way. I was much more prepared for the course this time around. Shortly after the exam period in April, I moved to Seattle, Washington for my internship at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer Intern. The move, for the most part, was quite smooth. I took the corporate housing option and now I am living by myself in an apartment in Ballard. It seems crazy to think that within the last 12 months, I have lived in three different countries! If there was any point in life to go and explore the world, it's definitely now. I have really made it a priority in the latter half of my undergrad major to explore as many opportunities as possible. Amazon has been a really interesting place to do an internship. I have never worked in such a big corporation before. During my previous co-op work terms, majority of the time, I felt I was placed in a role of more of a temporary full-timer. At Amazon, I felt that this has been a real internship where I gained useful mentorship at improving my technical and soft skills while doing meaningful work. It's also been awesome that Amazon places a strong emphasis on making sure that interns enjoy their time at Amazon to promote the company when they return back to their schools. Being such a big company, there are also many resources to learn from which include learning series lectures, various talks and internal company conferences. What have I been working on? I have been working on an internal Ruby on Rails web application tool that helps manages and organizes applications without going into too many details. Ruby on Rails hasn't been too hard to pick up because I have worked on Python and Django framework in the past. They are pretty similar. Something tells me that I haven't been exposed to the true greatness of Rails though. While I am on the Information Security team, I am not exactly working in Security based tasks. However, being on a security team, I have the luxurious opportunity to immerse myself into the field of security. It has been quite rewarding to learn so much about this field and the potential from various Security Engineers. I have been blessed with so much resources to learn from. This is where I learned that school teaches you nothing about security unfortunately. I am quite interested to pursue this field. On a side note, registration for Grace Hopper Conference is open! I highly recommend any female technical students to go! Perhaps I may meet you there? :)