I am fortunate to have been coding professionally since 2023. Each step along my journey was a mixture of faith and hard work, one that I hope to summarize below.

My first semester of college, I enrolled in the data science minor track, setting me up for a year of research engineering in Dr. Tingting Chen’s Mobility Scooter Lab at Cal Poly.

In June of 2023, I became president of Google Developer Student Clubs at CPP. My predecessor also referred me to Growth Warrior Capital, an AWS Accelerator, where I was on the Elevo product team as a junior full stack engineer. From there, I was mentored by the team, who made coding seem like an art with how strict we our chosen syntax style and documentation procedures.

I concluded my contract with GWC in February 2024, and founded Verdugo Web Services alongside Garrett Lo as a way to keep the lights on. After gaining our first client in April of that same year, we would grow to support 5 other brands, generating over $2,000,000 in revenue for our clients.

After striking out for an internship in summer of 2024, I succesfully interviewed at Google and Microsoft for 2025. Just for reference, passing those took around 250 hours of prep, and just over 200 leetcode questions.

In between the time I interned at Microsoft and when I graduated in December of 2025, I worked on 2 major research projects in Dr. Chen’s lab. The first is the Mobility Scooter Web App, which I presented at the 2025 American Medical Informatics Symposium in Atlanta, GA. This was my first deep dive into infra, system design and distributed systems, all knowledge that would help me during my internship.

The second major project I worked on when I returned from Microsoft was a video anonymization pipeline, as part of a broader research effort exploring the oversight capabilities of mulit-modal LLMs funded by Google CAHSI. It was here that I grew even more, learning about model optimization, GPU pipelines, and HPC systems.

Throughout my time in high school and college I have mentored and received mentorship from many people. If you take anything away from my story, it should be to always be looking for mentors and opportunities, and give back wherever possible.

To me, being unprepared when life throws you a bone is simply unacceptable, and I encourage you to find what motivates you to reach that level of committment to a process. For me, it was watching neetcode videos and solving problems every day (shout neetcode.io) and conducting mock interviews with my friends until I hit my big break, then referring them to people in my network when a new role was shared. For you, that process might be different, and I encourage you to keep trying until you find what makes you tick.