How’s it going! I decided to take a week off from blogging in the hopes that I could have some newer things to talk about. My team has made some great progress on our application, it’s nice to have confidence that we will be able to get things wrapped up in time. Open ended projects can be hard to put deadlines on, so I’m glad we’re doing well in that regard.

I do also want to say, I’ve really enjoyed working with Flutter. It’s very high pace and interesting with the way widgets work. I would love to work on my own mobile application one day if I get a good idea. The cool thing is that I have confidence that I could do it myself which is huge.

In other more serious news, I am very stressed about the conflict with Russia and Ukraine. Following along with the title of this blog, it really does put things into perspective. We’re so focused on our day to day lives, that we can forget how valuable it is to live in peace. It’s really disappointing that one person can inflict suffering on so many. I hope for the best for the people of Ukraine and hope that this doesn’t escalate into anything further.

In other news, I got a team match call with Google, scheduled for today! It’s in a domain that I don’t have experience in (cloud), but I’m eager to learn and hope that the manager likes me. In some ways it’s more stressful than the actual onsite interview because you don’t know if you passed. Right now I’m so close, I just have to be a good fit for the team.

There’s just been so much on my plate lately and I know I’m not the only one. The quarterly system can be super hectic. One of my teammates is also taking 3 classes… while working 20 hours a week! Absolutely crazy, and very impressive as well.

Lastly, I’m not sure if the same person reads each blog, but if so I hope you are doing well, and have a good day!

Hello again! To cut right to the chase, since the last blog my group and I have made really great progress on our project. We’ve made good progress on critical aspects of the project, so things are going according to plan so far. For our project, we are making a mobile treasure hunt, that gets users outdoors to explore user created hunts.

For my portion I recently completed, I designed the active hunt screen. Between you and me, it’s the most important part of the app, so it was cool to have that level of responsibility. There are other important pages, but this is the key aspect of the app users will use the most. It has been hard learning Flutter, the learning curve is a bit high, but things are starting to click. It really comes down to knowledge of the widgets, because one might exist that you didn’t even know about!

The concept of stateful widgets has been probably the most complex part. This is when your app updates new information. Flutter re-loads that particular widget to update new information. It became really tricky as you could imagine with implementing a live map that tracks the user’s location and must update at all times. I went with the Google Maps API to assist me, although the documentation is surprisingly scarce. I think it is because Google offers this feature on a lot of different platforms, especially webapps, so Flutter took a bit of a backseat. In that sense it has been difficult learning how it works, so I had to piece things together with guides and videos.

Y’know, that’s kind of what software engineers do though! We figure things out that we don’t know. We know that we can know, if we need to. That’s what I’m taking away from this, and it has helped me gain a lot of confidence going forward. I’m ready to keep tackling more parts of the project. I’m happy with what we have so far.

Things have been hard lately because there is a headcount shortage at Google. A privileged position to be in, I know, but what went from a 99% chance of an offer as it usually is from passing the hiring committee, is now about 50% according to my recruiter and a lot of new graduates hearts will be broken. This has greatly taken away my productivity as I’ve been keeping up with a Discord of students in the same position.

At the end of the day, careers are long and it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get it, but it would be a shame most definitely. Tomorrow I plan to mentally step away from that anxiety and start blazing forward. Every day is a new day, even if you had a lazy day, you can always tackle the next day with full force. Hopefully in the next update I can share good news! For now I need to keep focusing on my project and making a good app.

It’s hard to believe! I’m about halfway done with my last quarter at OSU. Time really flies when you’re… having fun (sometimes). I’m learning a lot in my classes. I’ve already learned so much about Flutter and building mobile apps. I’m undoubtedly producing some awful spaghetti code, but just being able to get started coding is a huge hurdle, and I will become better over time. It’s a cool feeling because I actually feel confident that I could legitimately build a mobile app on my own if I wanted to.

I’ve said it before, but I do really wish I could take only one or two classes.. I do think I’m doing a little bit of a disservice to myself for not having the time to dive as deep into the material as I want to. But unfortunately real jobs take precedence, and that’s the end goal of a degree, so I digress. I just like learning and I do honor academia.

In other news, I passed the hiring committee at Google which is absolutely insane. Right now there are a lot of students stuck in the team matching phase as Google has had to reevaluate headcount, but it’s pretty close to a surefire offer at this point which is so exciting. If I told myself two years ago I would be working for Google, I would have slapped myself and said I’m crazy. I didn’t even know what Oregon State was 2 years ago. Life really is crazy sometimes.

The stress is definitely ramping up on all aspects of life right now, but I’m here for it, and quite frankly that’s when I produce my best work, which is kind of sad, but also comes in handy as I know I have an extra gear if I need it. Overall I hope to keep making steady progress with my classes and finish OSU with a somewhat memorable bang if our project ends up being successful. Either that or someone steals my Google API key and charges thousands of dollars. We’ll see.