It's 2019: I am in college at the University of Washington without a major declared and a pipe dream of getting into the computer science program. I knew I wanted to go into Software Engineering but wasn't able to get into the program directly out of high school. I was in the same position as literally hundreds of other students competing for the handful of spots that were left for students looking to transfer into the program. I didn't have any projects under my belt, just code from classwork and my GPA was good but in such a competitive environment not good enough to be confident about getting into the program. What to do?

I began looking into projects, keep in mind that what you learn in computer science classes (especially the intro classes) is very basic and generally only helpful if you're given an extremely specific problem and only trying to solve it on your computer. No one tells you how to manage a full project, 3rd party packages/dependencies, and most importantly how to actually distribute your work, whether it's a website or an executable.

Enter Ginsu Eddy, a friend of mine from high school that had recently joined a group of upperclassmen UW students who were working on a project to take orders and deliver food from nearby restaurants on University Avenue to campus. The project was called avepass. He said that they were looking for developers to help out, no one was getting paid or making any money, it was just a group of guys learning and building a product. Below is a picture of most of the group, I am the handsome one (2nd from the left) and Ginsu is off my left shoulder.

Avepass Members

I met with one of the founders, Austin, and he and Ginsu showed me the app and introduced me to the developers. It was ~10 people all working in a room in one of UW's maker spaces known as "The Mill". Although it was mostly for physical engineering projects (think 3D printers) it had a big conference room that fit all of us and was on campus. I spend the first few weeks grinding out a course on Udemy about Javascript, React, and React-Native using Ginsu's account which already bought the courses. It was my first time working with a framework, working on websites/apps, and working on something that you can actually give a user! It looked something like this (pardon some of the faces)

Working at Avepass

The atmosphere was awesome and it was amazing to be around a group of people who knew so much more than me and were working together to build something. If someone had a question they could just ask the person next to them, we had Slack but obviousy didn't need it if we were all in one place. We met like this twice a week. During this time I was learning the basics of the app on Udemy which was also a blessing. How often do you get to see a product and codebase and be given time to just learn and immerse yourself into it before you have to contribute? Once I got the ropes down I started working on "the backend", aka making API routes.

Unfortunately I don't have things to show how the app worked but you can imagine something like Uber Eats/DoorDash/Grubhub but with restaurants near campus. We partnered with restaurants and gave them a tablet where orders would come in. We used to do delivery, one of the developers would go out and grab the food and deliver it to the large on-campus library, but that ended once the library said that was not okay. So users would have to go and pickup their food.

In terms of the timeline from this point I helped with writing backend endpoints for the next 2 years and after my internship at Apptio where I learned about Dockerization, Kubernetes, and deployments I switched us off of Heroku to an EC2 instance in AWS. In the final 1.5 years the upperclassmen had graduated and it was me, Ginsu, Dan Constantinescu, and Ryan Sorensson. The other 3 were doing a lot for the product in terms of thinking of big ideas and where to go next, as well as tackling some of the financial and legal challenges. At one point we had to rebrand from avepass to Takeoff and pay off the IRS for some taxes that weren't previously paid. I really respect those 3 for the initiative, effort, and love they put into the project and they had some big ideas of where to go next (think SnackPass).

One of my favorite memories from avepass was the beginning of my senior year. We wanted to make a big marketing push on campus so we printed out like 1000 flyers for Takeoff and the 4 of us spent a whole evening "storming the dorms". We went to literally every floor of every single dorm and slipped a flyer under the door. It took a few hours and I remember how nervous we were when we started, "Will the administration get mad", "What kind of trouble will we get into", etc. By the end of the night we were so excited by what we pulled off and we never heard anything from the school. We all went back to one of our apartments to celebrate and witnessed an explosion of alerts in our new user channel in Slack. It was amazing to witness and we were all buzzing. We had implemented a chat feature so we were able to talk with the new users (which was hilarious) and for a few days we had a new record amount of orders.

There's more things I can talk about and maybe I'll flesh out this post more or add another one but if it wasn't for avepass I'm not sure I would have been able to land my first internship and start my Software Engineering journey. I learned so much about how code becomes a product and basic things like working in git with multiple developers and branches. Although we didn't make any money the experience was well worth the time and in my career I've never had the kind of atmosphere like we did in The Mill. I've only worked in remote positions and even working in the Cisco office in San Francisco wasn't the same as most of my team was remote and we never worked with the kind of urgency that we did at avepass. I've heard many stories from people who have worked at startups, most mentioning the hard hours, instability, and general chaos but in those stories you also hear feats of passion, friendship, and learning. In my very limited experience it seems like it comes down to the culture of the company and the mission. I'd honestly love to work for a startup again, probably one that receives funding, because the amount you learn and grow seems unparalleled to working at a big firm.