Hey there! My name is Oscar David Rodriguez Moscosa and I’m a full-time software engineer with Google, a graduate of the computer science program at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico, and an MLH Fellow for Spring 2023 semester of the Major League Hacking (MLH) Fellowship.
I first heard about the MLH Fellowship from a friend in college, and I thought it would be fun to give it a try. I joined the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Track and got some amazing opportunities out of it. The MLH Fellowship has been an amazing launchpad for my career, so below are some of the highlights from my experience!
My Typical Day in the MLH Fellowship
Every day in the MLH Fellowship had a nice balance of workshops, events, reading, research, and some heads-down work. The program is tailored to focus on production and reliability techniques used by large projects to securely and efficiently scale to millions of users. I spent a lot of my time learning about everything from Linux systems, scripting, services and microservices, databases, test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, to monitoring, and troubleshooting.
The MLH Fellowship dug into topics and tools that aren’t commonly taught in a traditional computer science degree program. I learned skills like terminal commands, daemons, time-based scheduling with cron, Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol and other protocols, and so much more. I found these were very useful bits of knowledge that are a definite value-add to your skillset.
Joining an Innovative Community
MLH fosters an energetic environment. Everyone is always ready to help each other out and roll up their sleeves to do the hard work! It’s easy to notice the commitment and eagerness to learn and contribute among the other MLH Fellows. I learned tons of shortcuts and tricks from others in the MLH Fellowship which have helped me in my career. The terminal is my bread and butter, and I learned plenty of terminal shortcuts and commands from the program.
During my time in the MLH Fellowship, I met fantastic people from all around the world. The MLH Fellowship is a great network to be a part of, plus it is an active and easy platform to exchange your contact information with other like-minded individuals. The energetic and fast-paced environment of the MLH Fellowship made it easier to find mentorship and collaborate with others.
Building Valuable Career Skills
The MLH Fellowship has been huge in helping me further grow my career. Before joining the program, I had already come a long way in my tech career. I had interned with both Lyft and Google as a Software Engineer but the MLH Fellowship helped me tremendously with both improving my work and increasing my confidence as a Software Engineer. I am still working with the Google Search team, using the skills I learned in the MLH Fellowship to help my reliability team with managing and analyzing Search traffic.
For anyone interested in applying for the MLH Fellowship, I would recommend they leave the diplomacy aside and be as honest and open as possible. Showcase who you are with no filters, focus on who you are as a candidate, and what you are really hoping to get out of the program.
Interested in the MLH Fellowship?
Follow Oscar on LinkedIn, and visit our website here for more information about the MLH Fellowship and to apply for the program.