I’m originally from San Francisco. When I was hired by a Chicago-based company, I decided to move over here without having visited the city before. I told myself that if something goes wrong I can just move back, and mentally it felt like taking a very long weekend trip. Two years later, I’m still here.
Currently I am learning how to do two things I had zero knowledge about three months ago: baking bread and how to ride a bike. I recently rode in an unprotected bike lane for the first time, which was less scary than I thought it was. I will be pretty happy if I can eventually do hand signals without tipping over.
I studied Math in college and minored in Computer Science. I used to wake up at 5 AM on a Sunday to tackle whatever I was stuck on, which was exhausting but I had never felt more excitement. I’m glad that I found a career path that is similar in that I would constantly be given new problems to try and solve.
My team is amazing. They are always there to help me on something I get stuck on or take some time to explain concepts to me. In addition to being great at their jobs, they are even better people.
I think that part of why I enjoy Software Engineering at Buildout is that I don’t always exactly know the specifics of what work I will be doing from day to day. But in a more abstract sense, to borrow something I heard from my team lead: “We trick rocks into thinking”.
I was hired to work on a greenfield project to build our Prospect & Nurture tool and it's cool to see it go from zero lines of code to something that people are actually paying to use; I am glad to be a part of it.
In addition to having varied tasks in my day to day work on so I can learn, the Dev team also has a book club where we read a book and talk about it every two weeks. We are currently finishing up a book called Design For Developers.
Genuine
Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire
Hamburg, Germany
Solely based on how much their food interests me: Vietnam, Iran, and Serbia.
I once went to a Star Wars trivia event and ended up teamless. Since I am Chinese, it was the perfect opportunity to make a pun by choosing the team name Han Solo.
016 Restaurant, a Serbian restaurant and sandwich shop in Lincoln Square. Whenever I have a flight, I go there to get a sandwich to bring along with me.
