San Francisco Summer – pt. 2

rakina7 Comments

My internship at Square starts on July 6th, and I arrived at San Francisco on July 4th(!!)

Other interns start around May-June, and I’m the last incoming summer intern. Why am I so late? Well, to be an international intern at the United States of America, you need to be at least 18 years old, and I was born on June 26th, 1997. My internship almost got canceled because of my age, but my awesome recruiter, Veronica, devised a plan for a later start date exclusively for me just as I was about to bury my dream :’)  I sent her a big thanks email on the last day of my internship, sadly we never did talk in person 😦

Continue reading “San Francisco Summer – pt. 2” →

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San Francisco Summer – pt. 1

rakina3 Comments

So, this story is long overdue, but I will post it anyway 😛

I will tell you about how I spent my summer in 2015: Interning at an awesome company called Square in San Francisco! But before I tell you about that, let’s step back a bit to the first time I heard about Silicon Valley (the place, not the TV show). I was in my first year of high school, just beginning to learn how to program with Pascal, and I saw Mr. Sehat Sutardja on Metro TV, talking about his company in Silicon Valley. Curious about the place (partly because of the weird name), I searched around the internet about what kind of place that is. It turns out it’s the place to be for tech people! I also found out about other Indonesians (specifically TOKI alumni) who interned or lived there, mainly Kak Veni, Kak Gogo dan Kak Irvan (yang ini gak tau dulu tau darimana wkwk). Awed by how awesome the place sounds like, I promised myself an irrational dream for a random third-world high school student with no previous achievements: One day, I’m going to be there myself as an intern! Continue reading “San Francisco Summer – pt. 1” →

A change of direction

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People change. That’s a given.

I used to think OOP is boring. Now, I think it’s cool. I used to be scared of talking to people. Now, I’m not. I used to be a very ambitious competitive programmer. Now, I’m more excited to build stuff.

Inertia is the main reason it took me long enough to declare this. Moving on from the familiar stuff is kind of weird and scary, but the joy of learning new things overwhelms those concerns. The feeling had been decaying slowly but surely in the past year, anyways.

But some things stayed the same, even as the years go by. But that’s another story 😛 *bikin kepo*

Onward and upward!

Awesome Summer!

rakinaLeave a comment

Yeah yeah I know Indonesia doesn’t have ‘summer’. But it’s hot outside so I’ll just call it that.

So, my ~3 months long holiday just ended last week (Though I skipped all the classes this week but that’s another matter). Last year, I spent my 3 months with playing games, browsing the internet, etc. I regretted that summer very much. So I decided to do interesting stuffs this year, and I did!

  • Competitive programming: I’m still doing it and I don’t think I’ll ever stop in the foreseeable future. I am targeting for ICPC World Finals this year so yeah, I practiced most days and participated in CF rounds. Last week I solved 3 out of 4 problems that my team solved in Compfest’s preliminary round. (could’ve solved 4 or 5 though)
  • Real programming: I contributed to the open source world! Well I solved some small issue in TOCC and I become a maintainer of Regrader (thanks fushar!). It’s awesome how much I learned from such small contributions.
  • Campus duties: As some of you may already know, I am an IT Development staff at BEM Fasilkom UI, my faculty’s student union. I got assigned to design the members’ profile page and attendance list, and the media division’s poster-design ordering system. Cool stuff, learned a lot about front-end!
  • Summer job: I am coach for DKI Jakarta’s Informatics Olympiad team this summer! Learned a lot of stuff by teaching these nine kids and preparing problems for them with my awesome coach partner, Jessica. Totally worth it to spend almost all of August teaching them!
  • Internship search: I’ve always wanted to do an internship in an awesome company/start-up, so I did a lot of research this summer and gathered a list of awesome places to work and people to network with. I’ve already sent my applications to a few companies. So far so good.
  • Learning new stuff: Learning from past experience, I decided to only enroll in one Coursera course. And it went well! Almost done with my machine learning class, learned MATLAB for the programming exercises. I’ve also read some books on computer networking and Python and I’m also a lot more confident in my familiarity with the UNIX environment now. Woohoo!