My first introduction to programming was actually through wanting to keep in touch with my friends when I moved abroad in 2009, at the start of seventh grade. One of my friend group’s favorite activities was playing MMO games together, but unfortunately many of the games we played were region locked to North America. Must to my dismay, I soon found out that I could no longer just hop online and start playing with my friends after moving to Saudi Arabia, instead I was just greeted with an access denied message. I couldn’t believe that I had just lost everything I built with my friends over the years, and there was no way to get it back or ever recreate it. But, I couldn’t take no for an answer. Instead of going the more simple route and trying to do location masking through VPNs, I came across the idea of a ‘private server’ for the game. Through just downloading a C++ project and setting up the proper port forwarding, I could rebuild everything I lost with the power of an administrator. And not only that, but I could have all of my friends join too and we could all play together again. While we soon found out that having a private server defeats the purpose of an MMO game, I loved the idea of being able to use software to build almost anything I wanted.
With this foray into programming, I quickly thought of how many of the things I enjoyed were all driven by software, from the microwave heating my popcorn, to the video games I spent countless hours on. I wanted to have a part in building all of these things that I love. So I did, I constantly tinkered with things. I would try to download the source code for classic programs, like a calculator, and just toy with the code and see what I could make it do, how I could extend it or suit it to whatever I wanted. I took every software course I could in High School, and I knew exactly what kind of work I wanted to do in the world. When I started at the University of Virginia, Introduction to Programming was one of my favorite courses, and it felt amazing to be with so many others that also enjoyed programming.
One of the main facets of programming that drew me to the discipline was simply the flexibility of it. Through just a text editor and modeling software, one could build a simulator that models the entire universe. I wanted to know how it was possible from the bottom to the top. Thus, the reasoning for my Electrical Engineering degree. I found my four years at UVa fascinating, from learning of the lowest levels of circuitry, simple resistors and capacitors, to how those are cascaded and connected to create pipelined Central Processing Units that then enable programmers to develop any software they could imagine. What finally brought me to my Software Engineering career was the aforementioned flexibility, while I greatly enjoyed learning how physical hardware can power the creations of today, I much prefer the quick feedback and enablement that software development provides.
From writing in languages that ranged from Assembly to Python, I saw how each generation of programming languages concentrated on improving the flexibility and power of programming. This idea is what led me to Appian, a company whose sole focus is providing a development platform that enables anyone with an idea to develop their own software, not just programmers. I have worked at Appian for the last two years on their backend infrastructure, helping to power this platform for hundereds of customers across the world, both scalably and reliably. Much of my work revolves around building out and increasing the usage of Appian’s Kafka clusters, and extending the functionality of our in-memory database management service. Unforunately next to nothing in this world has 100% uptime, so part of my job is also 24/7 on-call duties to remediate any issues in our own managed infrastructure and any on-premise installations.