remote work: efficiency and work-life balance
In the summer of 2022, I had the pleasure of attending Google's 11-week virtual program: the Software Product Sprint. The SPS program consists of three portions: building a personal portfolio, building a web app with a team of 3 other devs, and practicing interviews with Google engineers. The process was quite fun, and I'd definitely do it again.
Aside from the "Software Sprint" aspect, we were also required to complete weekly reflections, which introduced me to Google's company culture. Since the program was fully virtual, you'd think that we would not be engaged with the program staff and mentors. That's incorrect. There were daily workshops and networking sessions targeting different groups of people, and we had 1:1s weekly with our project advisor. Overall, the experience I had at SPS was never disengaging.
For the first four weeks, we had weekly walkthroughs that guided us to create a personal portfolio. Since I already built my website before attending SPS, I focused on learning the usage of Java servlets and the syntax for backend, as I was lacking experience in backend development beforehand. These four weeks were the easiest in workload, so I was able to attend multiple networking sessions during that period. My favourite workshop was "Dealing with Imposter's Syndrome", which was something I faced especially when I was accepted into this program.
The Sprint stage was a 4-week period where we built a web app related to a topic of our choice. We decided to build a web app that helped users fight inflation by showing them the best deals at a store given a list of shopping items. I was the main front-end developer in charge of designing the UI and building the landing page. I also spent some time playing around with the Kroger API and Java servlets because I wanted to gain back-end experience and challenge myself.
We also had the chance to work with three different Google Engineers and practice interviewing. The questions we had were Leetcode Easy/Medium and the engineers focused on getting us to communicate our thoughts. Since I had previous experience with Leetcoding, I didn't have troubles with solving the problem, but more about communicating my thought process with the interviewer. The engineers I worked with all had different styles of communication, and I was able to learn from each of tehm despite having similar questions in the three sessions.
best, akkkkira