Hello this is my first post on this blog. I am writing this as part of my capstone project in my final quarter at Oregon State University. While getting my first degree in Chemical Engineering I was exposed to some Python programming and really liked it. However, it was too late in my degree to switch to Computer Science so I continued with Chemical Engineering. Once I graduated I traveled for half a year and then moved to California to live with family and apply for jobs.

After spending months applying places, I interviewed with a cannabis production startup in Oakland. It seemed pretty interesting and it was a month before prop 64 was going into effect in California so I was able to be a part of something brand new. After 2 1/2 years of working in this industry Covid hit and I decided I should go back to school and pursue computer science. The cannabis thing was fun for a while but I was pretty confident it was not something I wanted to continue doing.

I worked full time and did school full time for about the first year of the program. I went though the free full stack open course and learned about React and modern web applications. I applied to some internships for summer of 2021 after building a full stack project and accepted a role at a company working on their React Native app and quit my full time job. After the summer I declined the companies offer to quit school and work for them and decided to do school full time and apply at larger software companies. This worked out and I interned at Amazon summer 2022 and will start full time with them in January :).

At Amazon my project was to create a full stack application that integrated with their internal single sign on system. I used CDK to define the infrastructure as code and lambdas for the compute logic. Working with AWS was really cool and is something I want to continue doing and will use for this capstone project. I also worked with React for this summer project. For any UI or frontend stuff I will use React because it is what I know best and there is tons of support for it.

For this capstone project I am most interested in the Craigslist clone but I am open to anything. Currently I am living in Guadalajara Mexico until late October and am taking some Spanish classes in the morning. My hobbies include traveling, beach volleyball and surfing. I live in San Diego and feel super fortunate that I was able to intern and get a job offer based out of the Amazon office here. There are not many big tech offices in San Diego and I was worried I would have to move if I wanted to get that kind of experience.