Almost 8 years ago to the date, I got an e-mail from my PhD advisor asking me if I’d like to spend a summer working for eBay/PayPal.
It was a golden opportunity to join a well established company in Silicon Valley.
Needless to say, I was also ecstatic about the opportunity to go out to California for the first time. As someone who grew up on the East Coast, I had always heard about the awesome weather and I’d always identified with Californian culture through skateboarding.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was pretty late in the process to be looking for intern candidates. All big companies typically wrap up their intern search by the end of February at the latest. I was very lucky and it has never gotten lost on me how fortunate I was to even be considered for this position.
Meghdoot, the hiring manager (and my future manager) called me a few days later. I don’t remember what we talked about but he must have been impressed because after a week or two later I booked my first trip to California to start my first internship.
And that’s how it all began. What followed was a series of adventures that have shaped my professional and personal life in ways I could not even have imagined on that otherwise forgettable Sunday in April.
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I got to talk to an entire room of Mesos developers about the work I did on trying to unite the Mesos and the Hadoop cluster manager.
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I got to win 2nd place at a hackathon contributing to a project I would later become a regular contributor to.
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I got to build an open source project that people outside of the company used.
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I got to pitch our team’s future vision of Containers as the building unit of an entire platform to the former PayPal CTO, James Barrese, at an intern showcase (which incidentally generated some interest internally in our project).
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And then (amongst other things), I got to help bring the vision of that platform to life over five years (in several incarnations).
The journey comes to an end this Friday, May 20th as I turn in my PayPal laptop and badge.
What an excellent journey it has been.
Looking back, my co-workers were big part of the ups in this journey and I couldn’t have made it this far without their support, respect, mentorship, and finally, but maybe most importantly, their friendship.
I sincerely could not have asked for a better first project or a better first team.
I’m so incredibly proud of all that I (and my co-workers) did over these past few years and can’t wait to see what the next few years will bring.