Life
University of Waterloo
I went to the University of Waterloo in September 2009 to study systems design engineering. It's a multidisciplinary program, mainly combining mechanical, electrical and a little software engineering. As part of it, I did six 4-month internships (co-ops), alternating between school and work every four months. My last three were in high tech: software engineer at LinkedIn, software engineer at Google, then APM at Google.
The Accidental Engineer
There's a funny story about how I ended up at Waterloo at all. My older brother had been into computers his whole life. I hadn't — I didn't understand how they worked, didn't know the settings, couldn't get them to do what I wanted. And my brothers and cousins were all much better at computers than me and would make fun of me for not knowing what I was doing. I remember thinking, fuck this — computers suck if they make you feel like this.
So heading into 12th grade, when I finally had to decide what came next, I didn't know where to go to school or what to study. I saw a movie — Cameron Diaz? I think it was called Fool's Gold — and decided it would be cool to be a marine biologist. Be in the sun, swim a lot, spend time in the water. Wouldn't that be kinda nice?
Choosing Waterloo
My brother ended up going to Waterloo for computer engineering. I wasn't sold — I had my own ideas about what was best for me. I remember thinking I needed a university with strong academics but also a strong social scene. I must have been parroting that off some Canadian university forum, because I definitely had no idea what it meant.
I'm the type of person where, if I can't really visualize something, I have no clue what to expect from it at all. Anyway, about as far from home in the other direction was McMaster. It was known to be good, especially for people on their way to becoming doctors, and a lot of the cooler kids were headed there and the parties were supposedly fun. I decided McMaster was where I should be, and I kept telling my brother and everyone else that's probably where I'd end up.
I applied to Waterloo anyway and listed mechanical engineering, then got back to my 12th grade year, which mostly consisted of hanging out. A few months in — I think I was on the computer in the basement — the early admission results came from Waterloo. I got in. I was shocked, relieved, and somehow also expecting it, all at once. That weird mixture of feelings would become pretty normal for me over the next 15 years: simultaneously knowing I was going to get in, not expecting it, and being fine with whatever happened anyway.
The Pivot to Systems Design
By the middle of the summer, with Waterloo maybe six or eight weeks away, I went online to double-check exactly what I'd gotten myself into and pulled up the mechanical engineering page. I was horrified. It looked like I had signed up for one long physics class. The only thing I could think was: I hate physics and I suck at it. I do not want to be doing this.
I knew I had to do something, so I went to the engineering site and looked at what else Waterloo offered. Nothing seemed interesting, and then I saw it. Systems Design Engineering. My first thought, and I shit you not, was that I had to be in that program because the name had a nice ring to it.
I called Waterloo and asked if I could transfer into systems. They said they'd get back to me, and in the meantime I read through the course list. I didn't really know what a lot of the courses were, but I liked the words they used: holistic, multidisciplinary, integrated. Sometimes in life you know before you actually know, and this was one of those moments. It sounds ridiculous now, but when I told my friends the story later, that's exactly how they described it: a really "me" moment.
Discovering My Inner Nerd
One day, though, I got it into my head to install Ubuntu. It might have been my brother's doing, or maybe he just mentioned it and I figured, fuck it, let's try. I had a Dell laptop at the time and was so frustrated by how weird everything on Windows was. I just didn't get how things worked. I'd get confused or stuck and couldn't figure out why the computer wouldn't act how I wanted.
Part of it was probably that everyone else in my family was good with computers. When you grow up with a bunch of boys and they're all good at something you aren't, you don't get much time on the machine to learn. We grew up with one computer that we all shared. Remember computer accounts you had to sign into? That was us.
So that day I read about dual booting Windows with Ubuntu, and I installed Linux on my laptop. I didn't know what it meant to partition a drive. I didn't know what a BIOS was. But eventually I got it running, and I swear that was one of the days that changed my life. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, it was pivotal.
The Linux Revelation
I didn't really know how to navigate Linux at first, but things felt simpler. Cleaner. I felt like I could slowly start to get the computer to do what I wanted. I learned to use the terminal and the unix utilities, and I thought it was awesome that one program — the terminal — could control so much of the machine. It felt powerful, and it felt easier.
I started using vim to edit files and g++ to compile and run programs. I learned to debug with print statements and by reading logs. Little by little, I got more comfortable. Around this time, my older brother was already at Waterloo and in the co-op program there.
Co-op interviews meant coding tests and algorithm questions you had to solve, usually optimally, and then code up. My brother was practicing those problems, and sometimes I'd try to copy him and study them too. It was hard, and I couldn't solve most of them. But for the first time in my life, outside of playing video games on them, I started to like computers.
First Programming Experience
There's another funny story about how I first programmed. In tenth grade we had the option to take a programming class, and I signed up. My teacher was awful — unbelievably boring, without the faintest idea of how to motivate people. She taught us Pascal, so my first programming language was Pascal.
The games and examples she showed us were so dull that I tried to do the absolute bare minimum and be done with this programming thing. For my final project I made a simple card game. I barely tried, and it showed. The game sucked. It was buggy and nothing to be proud of.
That pattern would mark the next 15 years of my life: I couldn't be damned to try hard if I wasn't genuinely interested, but I always had just enough wherewithal to scrape by. And funny enough — I'm not proud to say this — Mrs. Parker was also a graduate of the University of Waterloo.
The Internships
The co-op program ended up mattering more to me than the classes. My first few internships were at smaller Canadian companies doing web development. Good experience, but nothing that grabbed me.
My fourth internship was at LinkedIn in Mountain View — my first taste of Silicon Valley, surrounded by sharp engineers working on a product used by millions of people. I worked on search features, and watching the metrics move after my code shipped was a feeling I hadn't had before.
My fifth was at Google as a software engineering intern, on a team building internal tools for data analysis. The systems were more complex than anything I'd touched, and I liked the rigor of the place.
For my last internship I went back to Google, but as an Associate Product Manager intern. Switching from engineering to product wasn't the usual move, but I was curious about the other side — how products get conceived, built and launched, and how designers and business people fit into the picture. It stretched my view beyond pure engineering.
Finding My Path
Those internships taught me that I liked sitting between the technical and the strategic. I enjoyed coding, but I cared just as much about why a product should exist at all — what problem it solved, and for whom.
By the time I graduated in 2014, I had a much clearer sense of direction than when I started. Given that I'd picked my program off the sound of its name, that wasn't a high bar. But most of the education that stuck happened outside the classroom, on those work terms — and it pointed me straight back to the Valley.