A New Playing Field
I’m Simerus, a second-year Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. I love working on challenging problems at scale and creating solutions that make a real difference in people’s lives. My journey toward this passion, however, was anything but conventional. Growing up, I always wanted to be a soccer player. I played at the provincial level and had my sights set on becoming a pro, receiving university varsity offers in the process.
I played forward, and I loved scoring goals. It made me feel like I was having a tangible impact on my team’s success. However, I came to realize that this feeling of success didn’t truly fulfill me because it would only last for a game. That’s when I started searching for other things that interested me.
Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic was what steered me toward Software Engineering as a profession. I was in high school when it hit, and I witnessed firsthand how the sudden isolation impacted my friends, family, and community. Since I had already been exploring Computer Science courses on the side, I began wondering if I could use those skills to make a real difference.
Collaborating with a team, we developed an AI Therapy application that gained over 1,000 users. The main goal was to provide people with a platform to express themselves and improve their verbal positivity using gamification. Along the way, we formed partnerships with local high schools, collaborated on research with our local school board’s psychology department, and won several pitch competitions – I was even featured on Forbes.
That experience gave me the fulfillment I’d been seeking. I thrived in a fast-paced environment where a bunch of things were happening at once, enjoying every moment of building something that genuinely impacted people and added real value. This realization solidified my decision to pursue a tech career, dedicated to making a positive impact.
A Doorway into Tech — The MLH Fellowship
As I continued my journey, I learned about the MLH Fellowship after building a winning project at CruzHacks in 2022. I was in high school at the time and wasn’t old enough to pursue it yet, but in my first year of university I decided to apply.
I had seen a post about the Production Engineering Fellowship, a field that I wanted to learn more about because it’s something every company incorporates to scale their products but doesn’t really get covered in school. The Fellowship was my pathway to learning more about this field and starting my career in this space.
The content of the Production Engineering Fellowship was exciting. Each week, I learned about a new topic in Production Engineering, building a solid foundation alongside my Software Engineering skills. I learned about fundamental topics like cloud computing, system design, networking, operating systems, DevOps, troubleshooting, and more.
I put these principles into practice in my research and projects, too. For example, during the Fellowship, I worked on a Google Meet Clone with another fellow. I developed and deployed the app and facilitated many of the Fellowship meetings on it. It was pretty cool to see everything I’ve learned put into practice and being used by people.
After finishing the Fellowship, I landed internships at PlayStation, Meta, Microsoft and more. This winter, I’ve been interning at PlayStation. I’m carrying out a POC to revamp their infrastructure, with the goal of reducing costs, operational overhead, and maintenance. It’s been fascinating work so far, seeing how companies do things at scale.
How can you start your own journey?
For other Fellows or aspiring developers wondering how I got here, I believe a lot of it comes down to consistent effort. Last summer, I dedicated myself to learning new concepts and putting them into practice every day. You’d be amazed how much progress you can make with focused learning and practice over a month than if you just did stuff here and there over 4 months.
Production Engineering is a vast field, and you’ll never know it all, which is exactly what makes it so exciting. There are always ways to do things better, make things faster, and impact more people. I think that the beauty of infrastructure is that it connects every corner of tech. Every company relies on a well-designed system to scale effectively, thus making it a necessity.
I enjoy this field, and I can see myself working on these sorts of challenging problems for years. Recently, I built a distributed training platform that allows people to train machine learning models using MacBook clusters. I’ve also been building a Vercel clone for local development that allows people to deploy their microservices seamlessly by connecting regular (e.g., frontend to backend) and miscellaneous (e.g., backend to database/cache) service-to-service connections without the need for configuration.
I think that if you want to start your journey into Production Engineering and anything backend-infrastructure related, I’d recommend you start by learning the basics of this field. Focus on topics like networking, operating systems, and system design. Whether it’s through the MLH Fellowship or on your own, with the AI tools available and proper discipline, anyone can do the things I’ve done.
