My Technology Journey - Part Two
Continuing on from Part One, will focus this post on my journey while at Georgia Tech and graduating during the recession. I was a non-engineering major at an engineering school. Reflecting back, had an amazing experience at Georgia Tech and made life long friends. Though while there can be really taxing as a lot of folks don’t “get out” of Georgia Tech in four or five or six years. Took me 5.5 to get out!
Congratulations, you are a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket!
Woot! Excited. My sister went to Georgia Tech a decade before me and just following in her footsteps. Was shopping around for higher education options to further Rolac Inc (our home business). I wanted to be the best Macromedia Director developer out there. The most focused interactive / multimedia program close to home was at the Art Institute of Atlanta. Was sort of conflicted on what to do. After taking four years of computer science in high school with some coaching from the late and great Mr. Ronald Smith, go for a more technical degree. Steered me to look at Carnegie Mellon and not to forget about Georgia Tech. Long story short got into GT and decided a degree from a research university would be a better deal than a for profit institution. The year I graduated, my high school was the #1 feeder into Georgia Tech, I think 70/800 graduating seniors were incoming freshmen at GT. Lots of familiar faces!
STaC
The closest degree program at Georgia Tech to match my interest in becoming an interactive designer extraordinaire was a little known degree program called Science, Technology, and Culture aka STaC. The degree program I was under was re-branded to Computational Media when I was about to graduate. During my time as a STaC major, we focused on both sides of the brain. The creative / literature part and the computing / rationale parts. I found this duality enjoyable. During this time I had an interest of becoming a technology writer for CNET, since CNET was one of my favorite sites for technology news. I would not have the opportunity to write professionally until 2018, that in a later post. Technology was rapidly evolving around us.
Dawn of Internet Everywhere
I was at Georgia Tech from 2003 until 2008. During this time, shifts in technology were occurring. Compared to my sister who was at GT a decade before, first off we all had cell phones. We could call or text anyone without thinking where to meet, etc. Incoming freshman wise, I would say 30-40% of folks had a laptop. I had a desktop since I needed the power being a nerd. Later I switched out to a laptop. During my time at GT, they introduced Campus Wide WiFi towards the end of my time at GT. We had extremely fast internet at GT. We participated in i2Hub in 2004; those kind of download speeds were crazy I did not get that in my house until 2017 with AT&T Fiber. Wireless data in the terms of 2G/3G/3.5G were underway when I was a student. By the time I graduated, was expected to have data on your phone with access to e-mail and social media. Before we had a campus wide portal aka Buzz Port, a little website called The Face Book popped up in 2004. Georgia Tech was one of the first 100 schools let on and we used FB to see who was in what class. Social media really made the world a smaller place and the High School reunion less exciting. Being surrounded by technology in academia makes working in technology even more exciting.
Put in that WERK
During my college career I was extremely fortunate to get a long term co-op at IBM. My GPA was not the best, I really sucked at calculus based math. To get through the three math courses I had to take for my major, that took me seven semesters to get a passing grades. But perseverance pays off and I graduated late but finally. During my college career I had three jobs and most of the time was two concurrently. I was still working slowly on our home business, Rolac. I worked part time at the research part of the university, GTRI, as a cleared web developer, and in the summers worked at IBM (I swapped out GTRI for IBM later).
The Biggest Blue, IBM
My roommates were starting to get internships for the summer during our second semester of freshman year. I was new to getting a job and my GPA really sucked. I would not have considered working at IBM if not for my roommate Raghav who encouraged me to apply. He was headed up to Vermont to work at IBM for his first summer. I scoured the internet to find an IBM internship. Stumbled across one at IBM.com supporting sales efforts. Applied and low and behold I got a call back. Special shout out to my first manager at IBM, Lyn, for taking a chance on me since my GPA was not up to the cut. While at IBM, I was able to rotate around different groups in Software Group gaining experience. Three of my four stints were amazing, one was a real challenge.
Up, up, and…
After my first internship at IBM, I was ready to take on the world. I was mainly doing front end web development supporting the IBM Sales Portal. I helped to implement Web Sense metrics and even wrote some VBA to clean up the Web Sense Reports. I really enjoyed the Portal aspect of our website. Around this time, JAVA Portals were becoming popular, giving everyone a different experience. I was a huge fan of my iGoogle and My Yahoo home pages. I wanted to be part of the portal revolution. I learned that IBM had a brand that focused on this, was WebSphere. I was determined to get into a WebSphere team. Well my second year at Georgia Tech, I got an internship though for six months at IBM in RTP (Raleigh) working on the WebSphere Application Server Admin Console.
First Real JAVA and Hello J2EE
My second internship at IBM was a brutal one. My first time living out of state in Raleigh and having real rent instead of student housing at GT. Luckily at IBM’s RTP Campus. there were about 100 interns for the summer so was not short for fellow interns. I joined the IBM WebSphere Integrated Console team, we were responsible for administrative console. Reflecting back in all the concepts that I had to learn, I was ahead of where I would have learned them in my academic career. Up until now I was working in single class or single .JAVA files. All of the logic would be contained and executed mostly in a step-by-step fashion. I was thrown into the most bleeding edge JAVA you could think of. At the time during the Application Server Bloom. this is where the JAVA gets turned into HTML. I had to learn for the first time dependency management, design patterns, build, source control, Linux, and J2EE concepts with JSF on a bleeding edge team. I never used a Linux machine for much before then and I had a SUSE workstation. Really trial by fire. Though I was not preforming three months in and my manager decided would be best if I switch teams to finish out my 6 months internship stint. What a bummer! I would study design and system stuff at night to catch up and all for foo. I was really disheartened and thought I would break my lease and return to ATL. Problem was if I did that my Fall Semester already started and I would not be at Georgia Tech. Ouch! Luckily my manager worked with me to find another team.
Back in it to win it
I switched teams from the WebSphere Application Server IC team to the IBM Support Assistant Team. Though this time around I did a lot better. The concepts I learned in the WAS team I was immediately to put them to features that were being built and put in the product. I was able to complete tasks way ahead of schedule and became a valued member of the team. The ISA team used much more standardized tooling and processes vs the WAS Team. Reflecting back. the WAS team was creating the future and thus a lot of their processes would be a hodgepodge to support 100’s if not 1000’s of developers. The ISA team was a smaller 10 person team. After my stint with the ISA team, they allowed me to work remotely when I returned back to Georgia Tech. This was awesome for a student. I would VPN from my home and school and do testing. Was awesome beer money! This rolled into my fourth internship stint with IBM. My senior year I moved up to the Boston Area to work with Rational in the Automatic Software Quality Group or ASQ. The product I worked on was Rational Functional Tester. Our team was small, only five of us and one of those five was me, an intern! Did so much that final summer. I contributed to my first Open Source Project under the Eclipse Foundation, the TPTP platform. I went up for a patent along with the team for our contributions to the software testing world. Really a pinnacle of achievement but alas during the legal search we were stopped. In my head, I would be an IBMer for life.
Getting to the People
Towards the end of my last internship at IBM, I had some really great mentors in the company. I found that the time to climb the ranks as a Software Engineer was a 20+ year career path at IBM to be a customer facing or distinguished engineer. I felt that was a bit long and I really wanted to go talk to folks and help implement our solutions. Initially I wanted to be a pre-cursor to what would be a Sales Engineer; internally called IBM Software Specialist For <brand>. Had a few calls with ISS<x>’s learning about their path. I needed more experience. A good fit for me would be to join IBM Global Business Services, or their consulting services. I had a pair of options, go work for the next generation of our Tooling Platform, the IBM Jazz Platform as a developer or shop around for a GBS gig. I eventually found the dream job for me, joining the IBM Interactive Atlanta Innovation Center. After some talking and meeting with folks that I meet at my very first IBM internship, I was given the opportunity to join IBM GBS in ATL. But this was to-be in Summer 2008 and we were well in the way of a recession.
Thanks Recession
Long story short, my job offer was rescinded from IBM as they were laying off folks. The economy was not good and getting an entry level engineer even more so a consulting gig was hard to come by in ATL. There was a silver lining if you can call the opportunity that. Since I am a US Citizen, the powers that be at IBM got me into the Federal Practice in IBM GBS in a similar team in the Application Innovation Service. Only problem this job was to start in January of 2009 in Washington DC and currently is May 2008. My IBM internship was over. Since by then I had a good amount of J2EE and platform development skills, I was able to get a six month contract gig at Equifax doing J2EE development. Gaining domain experience is invaluable as I learned so much about how the credit process works and how central automation is allow the flow of credit to continue. My professional career officially started!
Deliberate Moves
Taking a look at my LinkedIN profile, does seem like a bounced around a bit. In part three, I will describe motivations and always wanting to learn and take on new responsibilities. Stay tuned!
