Who am I, really?
Hi there! My name is Birat Koirala and I like to solve problems.
You sound boring, is that it?
Okay, okay let me tell you more about myself. I like video editing. And playing games. And occasionally play guitar and singing badly. I like playing football and breaking ankles (figuratively, you boomers). I like chilling with my friends. I also like getting deep with it. You want to talk about why I think that life forms scale infinitely? Let's do it. You wanna talk about what makes J Cole the 🐐? Let's do it. You wanna talk about how beautiful the sunset hue on the clouds are? Let's get it.
I have a passion for learning and am constantly seeking out new challenges and opportunities to grow. Not just as a developer, but as a person. In order to do this as a software engineer however, I felt that any experience I could get with software in the real world would definitely come in handy.
So that's what I did. I applied to internships and more internships and... you guessed it, more internships. After a long year of applications, the wonderful people at Fundapps reached out to me, asking if I was free for an interview. I immediately said yes and two interviews later, I had a internship offer lined up. I was on top of the world.
So, how was Fundapps?
At Fundapps, I learned a lot of things. First and foremost was production level code. I'd barely even gotten introduced to the difference between "prod" and "dev" in my own time, so I had no idea what to expect. But, I persevered. I tried to learn as much as I could, whilst not knowing the impact this internship would have in my life.
To my team at Fundapps, if you're reading this, absolute big shoutout to every single one of you. My manager, my manager's manager, and especially my buddy who believed in me, pushed me and encouraged me to keep going, no matter the challenges I faced. I had an ABSOLUTE blast. I learned a lot, which is what I wanted to do all along. I created friends and it barely even felt like work.
I knew that my time there was potentially limited so I wanted to learn as much as I could. But also... I wanted to fail. I'm a big believer in iterating to become a better person and falling a lot lot lot of times before learning a lesson. So I got to work and went to town on..... the backlog tickets 😈. I was pushing tickets from the backlog left, right and centre. Sometimes, the tickets from backlog became bigger, and sometimes the tickets had already been fixed. But that didn't matter.
What mattered was I got to enjoy the best of what engineers do day to do - talk to each other about how to solve a problem, and again, and again. I felt like I was a part of the company. I started off as an intern, but by the end of it I felt like an actual engineer at FundApps. That's how I know it was a success. (and also because I knew if I came back here in the future, I would be happy)
Okay, you got an internship, big deal... tell us what happened next!
Then came second year of university, where I made many more lifelong friends than I did first year. Only in hindsight do I recollect the impact that COVID-19 had on all of our lives. It was an insane time. I also applied to more internships, I had the return offer from Fundapps under my belt and it was a place I would love to return to. But I wanted to keep learning and see what it was like at a different company. A company with a different scale of audience. Luckily enough, on a random day on March 14th I received an offer from Amazon to go to Dublin. I was ecstatic, overjoyed, filled with purpose. No words could describe how I felt at that moment because it felt like all the work I had done so far had been rewarded.
Skipping to the internship though, while the initial feeling itself was a reward the experience of moving to Dublin (for the first time) was not an experience I want to experience again (and hence, I'm moving to Dublin for the second time not the first😅 this summer). It was difficult to say the least - the housing crisis in Dublin was worse than I thought. Finding an accommodation seemed an absolute impossibility. And it was really nearly impossible. (To be continued)
The world is a beautiful and all consuming place. So my plan is to take it slow, not get caught up in the intricacies of it all. And hopefully, have an okay-ishly renovated shed by the end of summer :)