10 Nov What a journey

If you read my blog occasionally, you may have noticed quite a huge blank space from June up until October. The reason for this is because I was on a journey. It wasn't a typical journey, but I did indeed learn and grow a lot from this one-of-a-kind experience. It started from slight changes in perspective in various aspects of my life. Close friends noticed and told me to believe in myself and to reach for my goals. So, on a whim, I sent my CV to Google Taiwan. Within a few days, I received an email to schedule an initial phone screening. I never really did well in classes like algorithms and data structures when I was in school. But with different motivation, I read and studied and researched. I picked up the basics again quickly. Things like linked lists, stacks, queues are the most basic data structures. I spent a few days with the bane of my undergrad years, recursion. And then merge sort finally just _clicked_ in my head. Understanding Big O came intuitively after, unlike all those years at school. The phone screening went OK. I was asked to join a Hangout interview with a Gmail developer a week later. After that, I was scheduled for 3 on-site interviews and lunch at Taipei 101. It was a hectic few weeks, with each day consisting of learning more and deeper into computer science topics. I discovered amazing data structures like Bloom filters (which is a hash table in essence), and I read about NP-complete problems and how to solve some using dynamic programming. I implemented solutions to popular problems like the coin change problem, and I read Cracking the Coding Interview. I read simple solutions to seemingly hard questions, and changed the way I approached many difficult topics. After reading about Levenshtein distance, I even made a [JavaScript diffing library](https://github.com/mlcheng/js-diff) because I found it so interesting! In the end of July, I visited Taipei 101 for the on-site interviews. Google Taipei works specifically on Chrome OS and Android kernel development. Even though I specialize in web and front-end, I thought it would be a great chance to learn something new if I could join the Taipei team. But after the interviews, the team felt I could excel more in my original field of web development. Two weeks later, I was invited to two additional Hangout interviews with front-end developers at Mountain View. In mid-September, I received news that the hiring committee accepted my application for front-end software engineer at Google! There was no offer yet, but upon reading the email, I let out a huge sigh of relief. But it was much more than just relief. It was pride, knowing my skills were recognized by one of the top tech giants. It was happiness, knowing that I really did learn something new. And it was excitement, marking the end of a long journey but opening the door to a much bigger one. A few days ago, I signed Google's offer letter. I will be relocating to Chicago, where I will join the team working on Google's [Transparency Report](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/). There are still quite a few things to figure out, such as packing and finding a house. But all in all, I believe this will be a wonderful new journey.

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